Manpower

For this post I looked at Madison WI, Edison NJ, and Seattle WA.

For Madison, I noticed mostly contract and temporary positions, which was not too promising a start for the search. The jobs listed here varied pretty significantly, from truck driver to water treatment, but were almost entirely non-trade professions, and certainly not the kinds of positions I'm interested in. Probably the most lucrative of the positions listed was a Manager of Customer Service, offering between $75k-$90k salary. This too had surprisingly minimal qualifications: 3 years in leadership/management positions and at least 2 years working in the same industry.

My hometown in New Jersey wasn't big enough to make the list of locations Manpower covers, so I went through a couple of the relatively nearby options. Most of the towns/cities I looked at had only one or two postings, so I went with Edison NJ, which at least had 5. The jobs here looked to be mostly low-level business and sales jobs, which only vaguely mentioned "familiarity with cloud technologies" in their listing. Aside from that seemed to be low-level contract work with very minimal qualifications (more or less just GED and ability to use Word) and warehouse work. None of these jobs seemed to be very promising career wise.

I was actually very surprised at the results for Seattle. Seeing as it is the most populated of the areas I searched for, and the only real city, I would have expected more varied job listings, with better options available. Instead, I found more of the same low-level contract and temporary or entry level jobs that didn't seem at all interesting. Calls centers, clerks, administrative assistants, and other such jobs were listed. Of the jobs that advertised a salary, from what I know of the area, the listings were pretty substantially underpaying.


Overall, it seems like Manpower is more of a site useful for people who don't have the luxury of choosing a single career, and instead just have stand alone jobs. Additionally, both the east and west coast listings I found for the site were far more sparse (and growing up on the east coast I know I haven't heard of the site before this), so it very well may be that Manpower is simply more popular (and therefore slightly more varied) in the Midwest.