Most intakes never ask whether the local share is thin
Little Rock has 5,770 home health aides and a thin share of that job. Headcount is not the pool you can hire from.
An intake that stops at headcount will buy the wrong search. The question worth asking is whether this occupation is a thin slice of the metro or a common one. Those are different hiring problems, and a big employment number can hide either of them.
The concentration figure, how common the job is locally compared with a typical metro, answers that. A value under 1 means a thinner share than usual. A value over 1 means a deeper bench than a metro of this size would typically have. You do not need the jargon in the meeting. You need the distinction, because it changes the req.
Three rows that should not be averaged
Little Rock employs 5,770 home health aides. That sounds like a deep pool if you only read the count. The concentration is 0.58, a thin share. The median is $27,840. A recruiter who treats 5,770 as applications will keep buying boards and meeting the same people. The map may need to widen, and the wage still has to face a tight local band. Volume of workers did not mean volume of slack.
New Orleans employs 530 medical secretaries. The concentration is 0.19, much thinner. The median is $36,560. Here the headcount and the share agree: this is a small local occupation. A posting written for a city full of medical secretaries will ask for a finished specialist the market does not have waiting. The search looks empty because the screen was imported.
Knoxville employs 1,500 pharmacy technicians. The concentration is 1.16, a bit deeper than a typical metro, and the median is $38,270. A stalled req in that city is hard to blame on a missing workforce. The bench is there. The offer, the shift, or the requirements are the things to open first.
Same habit, three results. Read the count, skip the share, and you will run a Little Rock aide search like a Knoxville technician search, or a New Orleans secretary search like either of them.
What to ask before you approve the req
Ask which of the three situations you are in. A thin share with a large headcount means the radius and the wage both matter, and another board is a weak first move. A thin share with a few hundred workers means you are hiring in a scarce local occupation: train, relocate, or stop requiring a specialist you will not find. A deeper or ordinary share means a quiet req is probably the offer or the screen, not proof the metro ran out of people.
Write the employment count and the concentration on the intake as two separate lines. If someone averages them into "the market is tight," send the note back. Tight is a conclusion. These are measurements, and they are allowed to disagree.
Do not borrow a sister facility's posting across that line. A screen that is reasonable where the occupation is common becomes a wall where it is scarce. Consistency across cities is how a thin market inherits the wrong requirements.
Illustrative story
A director saw 5,770 home health aides in Little Rock and approved two more job boards before anyone opened the wage row. The concentration, 0.58, was on the same table and did not make the slide. The boards delivered the same small group. The debrief said the market was exhausted.
The count had been read as candidates. It was the size of the occupation. The share said the occupation was a thin slice of the metro, which is why a city-line search felt repetitive. They widened the radius to people who would drive, and they put the local median on the ad. The workforce number did not change. The brief finally matched it.
When you brief a req, say the headcount and say whether the share is thin. Then pick a search that fits that pair, not the last city you hired in.
https://reqradius.com/hiring/methodology/
Sources
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