Help Wanted: Philadelphia's top companies

Quick, which big company is advertising for the most new hires in the Philadelphia region in January 2015?
Comcast? SAP? Wal-Mart?  

Try Oracle Corp. That's what the folks at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based job search developer SimplyHired.com found, in a search of posted corporate hiring listings. SimplyHired also showed the Philadelphia metro area is still the nation's fourth-largest employment market, but has only the eighth-largest number of job openings (about 116,000). (See a list of the top five hiring employers in Philadelphia over the past year below.)

Oracle hasn't responded to past inquiries about its operations here, so I asked the Oracle veterans at Adminovate, the fast-growing Center City-based insurance software company whose founders sold their previous, Chester-based insurance software company, AdminServ, to Oracle for $125 million back in 2008, if it were likely their old bosses are seeking help so aggressively.

"It could possibly be true," Adminovate's Tim McKenna, an Oracle veteran, told me. "I have been getting many offers for Oracle positions in the area. Many of my friends and collegues are getting offers to go back to Oracle." And Oracle does have a string of local operations, mostly acquired in the late 2000s: Oracle Insurance (the old AdminServ), now in Bala; Oracle Primavera (construction software), also in Bala; and an Oracle education software group, in Conshohocken.

"Oracle is also incredibly more virtual" than other big Philly-area employees, McKenna added. "They truly don't care where you live." Though the company's California headquarters is plenty appealing when the weather is single digits here in Philly, he concluded.

Here are the five largest hiring employers, ranked by jobs listed, at six-month intervals over the past year, according to SimplyHired:

January 2015:
1-Oracle, 2-Johnson & Johnson, 3-Comcast, 4-Penn Medicine, 5-PricewaterhouseCoopers

August 2014:

1-Johnson & Johnson, 2-JPMorgan Chase & Co., 3-PNC, 4-Penn Medicine, 5-Bayada Home Health Care

January 2014:

1-Bayada Home Health Care, 2-Deloitte, 3-Genesis Healthcare, 4-TD Bank, 5-Johnson & Johnson