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• Employment accessibility is measured by considering job proximity, competition, and matching. • It is studied in a multi-modal transportation system. • The effects of poverty status, educational, and transportation mode are examined. • It finds that auto ownership is important not only for auto drivers, but also for transit riders. Accessibility has often been seen as a key indicator to assess socio-economic interactions and planning policies involving urban transportation and land use. Job competition and matching are important factors for individual job seekers as they evaluate job prospects, often including employment accessibility. However, due to inadequate data and the complex representation and interpretation of methods used, many studies have not considered job competition and matching as they attempted to assess employment accessibility. Most of the available studies do not analyze the effects of economic status, educational background, and transportation mode. In the small number of studies addressing job competition, few have considered the combination of multi-modal transportation access for commuters, though these are available in large metropolitan areas. In order to gain a better understanding of employment accessibility, this study adopts a method to assess employment accessibility by incorporating job proximity, job competition, and job matching in a multi-modal transportation system. This study focuses on the eight-county Greater Houston metropolitan region. Unemployed workers in the civilian labor force are a proxy for the number of job seekers. It is used to calculate employment accessibilities for job seekers in poverty, with different educational backgrounds, and commuting via multiple transportation modes. An interesting finding is that household auto ownership is an important determinant not only for auto drivers, but also for transit riders engaged in job seeking. In an automobile-oriented city such as Houston, driving to bus stops or rail transit stations provides job seekers significant advantages over walk-to-transit riders, especially for those living in suburban areas outside the boundary of the existing transit systems serving the central city or the core county. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]