Sonoma County's labor market may be on the mend, but there are still six times more job seekers than help wanted ads.
While those odds may seem daunting to someone looking for work, a new barometer used to track the health of the local labor market shows the county's economy is getting stronger. A year ago, the ratio of job hunters to postings was eight to one.
"It shows there are jobs out there," said Linda Wong, an analyst with the state Employment Development Department.
In a program launched last month, the state is getting job posting data from The Conference Board's Help Wanted OnLine service. It tracks the number of new and reposted job ads from 1,200 major Internet sites and smaller sites that serve niche and regional markets.
Before the local economy soured, Sonoma County employers posted nearly 7,000 help wanted ads every month in 2007.
Job ads fell to 3,000 a month during the depths of the recession.
But employers are becoming more confident and beginning to hire again. There were 4,000 help wanted ads posted by Sonoma County employers in February, the most recent month for which local results were available.
The most demand now is in health care, where there were 87 ads for registered nurses, according to data compiled by The Conference Board, a New York-based research organization.
Occupational therapists, physical therapists and medical and health service managers were also in the top 10 job categories.
Kaiser Permanente, which employs more than 2,600 in Sonoma County, had the most ads. Kaiser is growing, said Jan Austin, recruitment manager for its Sonoma-Marin region.
"Nursing is a very strong field, and medical assistants are popular right now," she said. Demand for those kinds of jobs isn't going away, according to Austin.
"It's an aging population and we're going to need help," she said.
The other top categories for employment ads were retail managers, retail salespeople, customer service representatives, office managers, executive secretaries and manufacturer sales representatives.
Local employers with the most openings in February included Sutter Health, Santa Rosa City Schools, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Medtronic and solar startup Enphase Energy.
The job posting data is just the latest evidence that the local economy has turned the corner and is emerging from recession.
Local employers have added 5,000 jobs over the past year, the most since 2004, the state reported earlier this month. The job gains, measured through March, marked the fifth straight month of expansion by employers after a 32-month period of contraction in local jobs. About 26,500 people remain out of work in Sonoma County, down from a record 28,300 a year ago.
The gap between job seekers and job openings has narrowed across the United States, with advertised vacancies up 600,000 in the first quarter, said June Shelp of The Conference Board.
"That's good news after the overall anemic growth in labor demand over the last 11 months of 2010," she said.
Help wanted ads aren't the only measure of the labor market's strength, said Ben Stone, director of the county's Economic Development Board.
Instead of advertising, small businesses often use referrals to fill openings, he said.
"A lot of that goes on in Sonoma County," Stone said.
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