Hiring demand showed some improvement in Southern California and nationwide amid other strong signals for economic recovery.

Online job postings for Southern California's Orange County rose to 40,145 during the week ending August 2. This was the first time they topped 40,000 since November 23 last year, according to a report by Wanted Technologies.

Earlier this month, online job ads edged up by 700, about 2.4 percent nationwide in July from June on a seasonally adjusted basis. There were 132,000 more new job ads in July, a current total of 1,433,000.

According to Wanted Technologies, hiring demand in seven of the top eight cities had improved. Notably, hiring demand was up 10 percent in Boston, 9 percent in New York and 7 percent in Philadelphia.

Statistics showed that hiring demand had increased in most business occupations, with management up 8.2 percent, legal occupations up 6.6 percent, business and financial sectors up 4.1 percent, sales up 4.0 percent, office and administrative occupations up 3.2 percent, and computer and mathematical occupations up 2.3 percent.

Primary and secondary industries were also doing well, statistics showed. Production occupations were up 5.0 percent, and construction and extraction occupations had risen 4.5 percent.

However, health care and transportation were the only two sore spots in the economy. Health care jobs were down 7.5 percent. Transportation was down 6.2 percent. The transportation industry lost 22,400 jobs in July, after having lost only 11,600 jobs in June, according to Wanted Technologies.

Online job ads for IT professionals by Silicon Valley companies had risen 15 percent after hitting a three-year low in mid-April.

The IT occupations with the greatest hiring demand in Silicon Valley included computer software engineers and computer systems analysts.

However, overall conditions had worsened for IT professionals nationwide, dropping 5.7 percent in July, according to Wanted Technologies.

Compared to last year, hiring demand for IT occupations was now down 35.7 percent.

Meanwhile, the recent July unemployment report from the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a slowdown in layoffs for that month -- 247,000, compared to 331,000 in May and June -- and an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, virtually unchanged from the previous month.

But the decline in temporary positions had "lessened substantially" over the previous three months, the bureau noted.

(Xinhua News Agency August 21, 2009)