The federal government yesterday announced the nation created a net of 71,000 new private sector jobs in July. Because of reductions in temporary census workers, state and local government jobs, the total number of people working decreased last month. So, where are these new so called private sector jobs? One non-governmental survey, dubbed the CareerCast.com/JobSerf Employment Index, has some answers.

The index, among other things, has tracked since July of last year job postings in 30 major metropolitan areas across the country. Four California areas - Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Riverside - are included in the survey. The scores represent the per capita online managerial job postings for each area, and the variation is enormous.

In general, until this month, the four California cities were showing an improving trend. But in July, three of the four California cities reported lower per capita job openings. Nevertheless, the chances of finding a job in San Francisco are still nearly six times better then Riverside.

For the Riverside area, long at the bottom of the list, the latest numbers marked the first actual decline in online job posting since last October. Riverside had been improving slowly, but steadily until now. The number of online job postings for Riverside fell by about 10% in the latest survey. Even though Riverside has many fewer jobs on a per capita basis than any of the other 29 major metropolitan areas across the country, job postings in Riverside are double their lowest level which occurred last October.

Up north in San Francisco, where there still are more per capita job postings than any other California city in the survey, the results for July also declined by about 5%. SF’s per capita online job postings, with only two relatively small exceptions, improved every month since the survey began tracking the 30 cities back in July 2009. At that time, SF had an index value of 51. Even though the number of jobs in SF pulled back in July, the current index value for SF, at 105, is more than double the one year ago starting point.

Los Angeles and San Diego, the other two California cities covered by the survey, are better than Riverside, but not nearly as good as San Francisco. The index improved for Los Angeles for the sixth month in a row and now stands at its highest level in more than a year. But, steady growth notwithstanding, with an index value of only 45, job postings in LA remain less than half of those up north.

A steady improving trend also came to an end in San Diego, where the index pulled back about 4%. Per capita online job postings in San Diego had been improving since October 2009. But, even with the modest pull back in July, the number of online job postings in San Diego is nearly double the number available back in October when the index hit its recent low.

Outside of California, the place to find jobs is Washington D.C., far and away the highest per capita job postings of all the cities in the survey, and Boston, running a strong second place. The numbers for Washington were unchanged in July and Boston lost about 10% on the month. San Francisco came in third place. With an index value of 176, there are ten times as many jobs per capita in Washington than in Riverside, with an index of 18.

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