Oregon employers apparently still have a lot more work to be done than people to do the work.

Online help-wanted ads for Oregon jobs remain nearly 40% higher than where they were before the pandemic, according to new data. The number of ads has dropped a bit this year but remains very high by historical standards, even as the state’s overall hiring has continued to climb.

Oregon averaged 40,000 help-wanted ads each month during the summer. That’s according to data from the Conference Board-Burning Glass, cited by Oregon Employment Department economist Jake Procino in a new report.

That’s a small decline from the average 46,000 help-wanted ads each month last year, so the labor squeeze seems to have eased a bit.

But in 2019, prior to the pandemic, Oregon averaged just 29,000 monthly help wanted ads.

The lingering labor squeeze illustrates the lingering effects of COVID-19’s economic upheaval. Oregon employers kept adding jobs while the state’s population stagnated, older workers retired, and people shifted into new professions — leaving old jobs vacant and hard to fill. At times during the pandemic’s aftermath, Oregon had more open jobs than unemployed people, though that’s no longer the case.

The Conference Board has been tracking help-wanted ads since 1951, when it began counting newspaper want ads as an economic indicator. The program began tracking online ads in 2005.

Advertising is not a perfect measure of job openings. Procino notes that some jobs, like construction work and farm labor, aren’t posted online. And he says tech jobs tend to be posted repeatedly. But help-wanted ads can still serve as a barometer for the broader labor market.

Nurses are Oregon’s most in-demand profession by far, according to the help-wanted index, with 4,000 new ads in the summer. That’s 600 more than a year earlier.

Retail and wholesale salespeople and customer service workers are the next most popular.

Software developers had the biggest decline, with just 925 new Oregon ads in the third quarter. That’s a 57% decline from the same period last year.