Illinois Job Postings Jump 61% Week Over Week, to 214 New Roles | Career App Daily

Illinois added 214 new postings this week across the employer job boards we track, up from 133 the week before. That is a 61% increase in one week, against a national week that grew 4.6% — 9,975 new roles this week versus 9,541 last week on the same set of boards.

In plain terms: Illinois grew about thirteen times faster than the overall board population it belongs to. Its share of all new postings we recorded moved from 1.4% last week to 2.1% this week. That is still a small slice, and 214 postings is a small enough number that a single large employer refreshing a regional board can move it. Treat the direction as the signal, not the magnitude.

You can browse the current inventory on Jobs in Illinois.

Where Illinois sits in the ranking

Illinois came in eighth by new postings this week among the 12 states with openings on our boards.

California remains the volume leader at 904 new roles, up from 854. Texas posted the biggest absolute gain among the large states, 399 to 582. Illinois sits behind Michigan (243) and Ohio (268), and ahead of Wisconsin (184) and Pennsylvania (178).

The week was a Great Lakes week

Illinois was not moving alone. The four Great Lakes states in our top-12 list — Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin — went from 544 new postings combined last week to 909 this week, a gain of 365. That is 84% of the entire national week-over-week increase of 434, concentrated in four states.

Michigan is the outlier: 87 new postings last week to 243 this week. Wisconsin rose 70%. On the other side, Massachusetts fell from 339 to 173 and Pennsylvania slipped from 190 to 178, which is what kept the national number from rising more than 4.6%.

What we can and cannot say about who is hiring

Honest caveat: our weekly employer and occupation counts are not broken out by state, so we cannot attribute the Illinois gain to specific companies or job titles from this data. What we can say is which employers drove the national week. Ranger Boats led with 363 new postings and 718 open, followed by Meijer (340 new, 678 open), Cleveland Clinic (319 new, 903 open), JLL (309 new) and Citigroup (299 new). Tyson Foods added 295, U.S. Bank 241 against the largest open book in the top ten at 941, and Jabil 213.

Several of those — grocery, hospital systems, food processing, commercial real estate services, banking — are the kinds of employers whose footprints extend across the Great Lakes region, but the packet does not tie any of their postings to Illinois specifically, so we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The occupation list is empty for this week's cut, and our posted-salary medians are computed nationally rather than by state. For reference on the national pool, Software Engineer has the deepest pay-disclosed sample at 1,184 listings with a median of $240,000, and Machine Learning Engineer shows the highest median at $283,500 on a thinner 109 listings. Those are employer-posted ranges annualized to USD, not what anyone reports earning, and they say nothing about Illinois in particular.

Context for anyone actually applying

The wider picture is one of churn, not expansion. Across the boards we track there are 56,987 open listings from 691 employers. We recorded 9,975 new postings in the last seven days and 18,016 closures — so inventory shrank even in a week when new postings rose. Remote roles made up 5% of new postings.

For Illinois candidates that means the 214 new roles are worth checking early. Postings on these boards are closing faster than they are opening.