"It's hard to leave, but the cost of living means more opportunity," said Soony Kim, a registered nurse at Pali Momi Medical Center, intrigued by the two offers she got from Las Vegas hospitals. "We want to buy a house, and we can't buy a house here."

When workers like Kim leave the Islands, it only compounds the recruiting challenge for Hawai'i businesses facing the tightest job market in 13 years. On Monday the state reported that unemployment dropped in August to 2.9 percent, its lowest since 1991.

Several blocks away from where the nurses were checking Mainland opportunities, 132 recruiters were trying to fill thousands of immediate openings in Hawai'i at the fall Job Quest job fair at the Neal Blaisdell Center. It was the largest number of recruiters ever for the fall fair and drew 4,571 job seekers.

Economists and state labor officials predict that Hawai'i's tight labor market will continue at least through the holidays.

Table after table at the Blaisdell yesterday advertised "immediate openings available."

Lisa Wong had six positions to fill at the Hawai'i Convention Center and shook her head at the $300 cost and effort to set up a Blaisdell booth to look for just a half-dozen people.

"It's an unbelievably tight market," Wong said. "Everybody's looking for the best people."

Unlike job fairs of the past, recruiters were offering mostly full-time positions, although some are now imposing pre-employment drug screening.

"It's looking good," said Keith Wilson, 30, of Wahiawa, who was considering full-time possibilities in environmental cleanup and with the Maui Police Department and federal Bureau of Prisons. "It's looking real, real good. ... I'm confident, that's for sure."

The much more subdued nursing recruitment at the Ala Moana Hotel was reminiscent of the successful Mainland efforts over the past five years to lure away more than 100 Island police officers.

"Oh, my gosh," said Caroldean Kahue, interim collective bargaining director of the Hawai'i Nurses Association, when told of the nurse recruitment.

"The hospitals already are short here, and we don't have enough nurses coming out of school to fill the need."

Some 150 Hawai'i nurses e-mailed their résumés, visited the Ala Moana Hotel or otherwise contacted the recruiters, said the job fair organizer, Henry Roman. A handful walked away with job offers.

Natalie Gardner, of Mountainview Hospital in Las Vegas, shows details of her hospital to prospective employee Soony Kim at the job fair featuring Mainland hospitals, held at the Ala Moana Hotel.

"We saw a lot of recent graduates," said Carol Jackson, employee retention director at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles. "We told them to get a few years of experience and stay in touch."

Although Hawai'i lists 14,240 registered nurses, the exact number still in the Islands is unclear, said Julie Johnson, dean of the University of Hawai'i school of nursing and dental hygiene.

What is certain is the continuing shortage of Hawai'i nurses.

Johnson is the chairwoman of the statewide nursing shortage task force, which found a nursing shortage of 1,000 in 2000. The task force predicts the shortage will worsen to 1,500 next year and reach 2,300 by the year 2010.

"Hawai'i cannot allow their nurses to be recruited away to the Mainland because the state is experiencing a nursing shortage that is only going to get worse in the years ahead," Johnson said.

Hawai'i's situation is part of an international shortage "that's close to crisis proportions," Johnson said. "Particularly for states like Nevada, they're going to try particularly hard to recruit nurses from anywhere they can get them."

Yesterday they did.

As Kim discussed her frustration at not being able to buy a nice house in Hawai'i, recruiter Natalie Gardner of MountainView Hospital in Las Vegas quickly touted the benefits of Las Vegas' expanding housing market, fueled by the addition of 5,000 residents per month.

Kim and her husband, Edwin, and 9-year-old son could easily move into a brand-new, spacious home in Las Vegas for about $250,000, Gardner said.

Sunrise Hospital & Medical Center in Las Vegas will expand from 700 beds to 1,000 beds by 2005 and has 112 immediate nursing openings, said director of retention Karen Pelletier.

To keep up with the expansion, Pelletier said, Sunrise eventually will need to hire 300 nurses.

Pelletier offered jobs to six Hawai'i nurses in June, hired another yesterday and expected to make an offer to another by the end of the day.

Jackson, of Hollywood Presbyterian, said her two-day trip to Honolulu would be worth the effort if she returned home with two or three registered nurses.

Trevor Wright, executive director of human resources for Paradise Valley Hospital in National City, Calif., had even less ambitious goals. "I'd be happy if I got one or two," Wright said.

The nursing job fair at the Ala Moana Hotel was the first by Roman, who runs a Wai'anae-based job-recruiting Web site called alohaspeakers.com. He is planning another nursing job fair for late December or early January and expects to have twice as many hospitals recruiting then.

Yesterday, Roman insisted that he is not interested in sending large numbers of Hawai'i nurses to the Mainland.

"We just want to pull out the cream," Roman said. "If we kill the cow, we're going to kill ourselves. I live in Wai'anae. If I get in a car accident, I want somebody to be able to take care of me."