Navigating the Employer Database

February 3, 2023

Finding a job is easier if you know where the employers are. The Employer Database tool on QualityInfo.org can help with this. This tool provides information about over 300,000 businesses in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Northern California.

The Employer Database can be searched in two ways:

• By employer name
• By industry

There are also several options to narrow (or expand) the geographic scope of your search. You can now search by:

• Zip codes
• Cities
• Counties
• Workforce regions
• Entire states

The Employer Database tool also allows searching for all firms within a given area (except entire states).

Here’s a quick example of how the tool could be used to find residential construction firms in Curry County:

• Select a specific industry. You can either scroll through the list, or type an industry name in the select box. Typing ‘construction’ here will help narrow down the choices!
• Select ‘2361 – Residential Building Construction’. The ‘2361’ part of this is a NAICS code, a standard way of classifying industries (more on this later). You may notice a number in parentheses after each industry choice. This is the number of firms in that industry for the geographic area you’ve selected.
• If you want to see where these businesses are in the entire state of Oregon, you can just click the ‘Get Report’ button now. But to narrow our search down to just those firms in Curry County, select ‘Counties’ from the area type list, then ‘Curry County’ from the list of all Oregon counties.
• Now click the ‘Get Report’ button to get your report for Curry County. The report will show a map with the location of the firms, and a list showing the firm name, its address, and specific business. If you click the name of a firm in the report, you’ll get more information about that business, including a contact name and phone number, if available.

If you select a different industry, you may notice a couple of things: First, the numbers in parenthesis next to each industry have become much smaller. This is because these now represent the number of firms just in Curry County, not for the state as a whole. Second, have a look at the industries in the selection list that are near your selection of ‘Residential Building Construction’. Because the list is sorted by NAICS industry code, you’ll find other construction-related industries here, even ones that don’t have ‘construction’ in their industry title, such as ‘Building Finishing Contractors’ and ‘Building Equipment Contractors’.

To search for employers by name, simply change the search type to ‘Search by Name’, and enter the employer name (or part of it) in the name search box, and click ‘Get Report’.

It’s also possible to get a report for *all* employers in a city, county, workforce region or zip code. Just leave the industry unselected in the Industry Search, or omit a name to search for in the Industry Name search. This will generate a report for all businesses in the selected area (with the exception of entire states).

Note that unlike many of the other labor market information tools on QualityInfo, there is no option in the Employer Database to download all search results at once in a spreadsheet. This is because business information provided by the tool comes from a third-party vendor, Data Axle, which licenses its data to the Oregon Employment Department for use by job seekers, and restricts the download of large numbers of employers at one time.

For more information about how to use the Employer Database and other job search and career planning tools on QualityInfo.org, contact your local Workforce Analyst.