Surfing the Want Ads: Online Job Advertisements in Oregon

Online ads are collected by Wanted Analytics and reported each month through The Conference Board's Help Wanted OnLine (HWOL) data series. Job seekers can use the sorted online ads to target their search and speed up the process. Trackers of the economy also use the data as a source of real-time information about the job market.

Oregon job seekers had about 52,800 possible online advertisements for jobs that they could sort through in January 2012. That's well above the 33,100 online job advertisements that were available at the worst of the recession in May 2009, but a far cry from the crest of 77,600 advertisements for Oregon jobs that were online back in April 2007.


Monthly counts of online ads can serve as a proxy for current demand for workers, and trends in the number of HWOL ads should reflect employers' need for workers. By this account, Oregon is doing about as well as the nation in terms of growth in job ads, increasing by 5 percent over the year. Idaho had the fastest growth among Oregon's neighbors at 13 percent.

For more details about online job ads, read the full article, written by State Employment Economist Nick Beleiciks.