Boston is a good place to look for a job

Globe Staff

Boston is the third hottest job market in the country, trailing only Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to a new survey from Monster.com, the job-recruiting website with much of its operations in Maynard.

One possible reason why Boston ranked so high is that employers in the information-technology and health-care fields are the most likely to be seeking workers, and the Boston area has a high concentration of those kinds of businesses.

In the state unemployment report released yesterday, the information sector of the Massachusetts economy was one of the few December bright spots, adding 600 jobs. The education and health services sector, though, lost 700 job as Bay State employers collectively shed 21,000 jobs. Over the last several months, the local health care industry has been struggling as expenses rise, patient visits decline, and pressure to control costs has intensified, an August Globe story noted.

Nevertheless, Massachusetts is faring better than many other states in the country.

In a press release, Monster.com said it "developed the hot markets/hot jobs ranking based on the relative abundance of job openings for the given local workforce --- the higher the rank, the more jobs available per person in the market."

"Within the markets we identified as prime spots for seekers, the hottest jobs fell largely within the IT and health-care industries," Jesse Harriott, Monster Worldwide senior vice president and chief knowledge officer, said in a statement. "This is largely due to the economic recovery where communities across the nation are starting to spend more on things like IT infrastructure and other areas where they'd previously avoided spending on, for as long as possible."

Monster has business relationships with many media companies including The New York Times Co., owner of Boston.com and The Boston Globe.

See Monster.com's top 10 list of hot job markets below.