September 2011: The 10 Best (and Worst) Cities for Finding a Job

If you’re looking for a job, you may want to head to the central time zone. The four cities with the most hiring activity in September are located there. Despite being one of the worst cities to find a job, Memphis showed the greatest improvement in managerial hiring with a 13% gain in September. The only other cities to show any improvement were Nashville (+3%), Milwaukee (+2%) and Chicago (+1%). Unfortunately, hiring activity dropped double digits (10%) in Miami, Hartford and Philadelphia. Losses were also seen in Boston (-9%), San Diego (-8%), and Denver (-8%).

To determine the cities with the 10 best and worst job markets each month, the CareerCast.com/JobSerf Index surveys 30 different major metro areas across the U.S. for per capita job availability. Rather than simply reporting the cities with the most and least jobs, the Index measures the number of job openings relative to population. This gives a more complete picture of how easy (or difficult) it is to get a new job in each metro area.

Want to know where the jobs are? These metro areas made up the 10 best cities to find a job in September: