If you are unemployed, underemployed, if it’s time for a job change, a change in geography, or just time to “get out of Dodge,” where you look can make a huge difference. Also, is the job action in your area improving, stagnant, or getting worse?

The CareerCast.com/JobSerf Employment Index has tracked the online job market since January 2007. At the start of each month, the research team searches for jobs on select major job boards and also on job search engines (sometimes referred to as aggregators). Using search words to retrieve jobs for different levels of management across dozens of geographies (both cities and states), the teams then review the returns to determine the number of real, relevant jobs that exist in each geography, at each career level, and on each job site.

The index tracks and ranks 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.

If you’re not having luck finding a job in Riverside, consider Los Angeles. Your chances—on a per capita basis—will more than double. But, you can do better than that.

If you look over from Riverside to San Diego, your chances improve by three times. In other words, there are just shy of three times as many per capita job postings for the San Diego area as there are for Riverside.

But, if that’s not good enough, consider relocating up north. After taking into account population, for every job posting in Riverside, you will find more than 5 postings in San Francisco. Not only that, San Francisco is the fastest growing of the four California metro areas tracked by the survey.

San Francisco’s index for June is 112. With 2007 representing the base year, a score above 100 means there are more online managerial job postings than the same month in 2007. To the extent 2007 was prerecession, San Francisco could now be said to be out of the recession at least as it relates to managerial job openings.

San Francisco passed the 100 mark in May. It is the only one of the four California areas which has an index score above 100. Riverside, on the other hand, has a score of 20, the lowest of all 30 cities across the country. This means there are only 20% of the jobs today in Riverside as there were before the recession.

Looking nationally, Washington DC and Boston have the highest scores and their indexes continue to improve. San Francisco is third nationally and only these three cities have scores above 100. Boston had the greatest improvement of any city measured by the index. Click here to read the full report or for more information.