What if Labor Exchange Worked Like eBay?

One New Start to a National One Stop
By John W. Courtney


Last year US employers made almost sixty million hires. That’s one for every four people in our workforce. The effort and volume of job matching information involved each year is mind boggling. But imagine an internet version of a true one stop for labor exchange: one spot so well connected that it reaches the majority of job seekers and job openings in every market in America.

America’s Job Bank (AJB) attempted that mission and made great progress in national labor exchange, but on June 30, 2007, it will close its virtual doors. Employers will not only lose a key solution for filling job openings, but also for complying with federal employment law.

Most of the talk around AJB’s dissolution has centered on how employers will meet the United States Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act/Jobs for Veterans Act . . . expialadocious. Despite the mouthful of words, the Act is noble in cause. It has most government contractors post open jobs with local government offices to help employ our military Veterans. AJB made this simple. It used the internet and a network of state partners to give employers a one stop spot to comply electronically.

For employers, AJB’s solution eliminated a cacophony of squealing fax machines and reams of paper at local employment services offices. In that sense, AJB was a compliance one stop. But, the Department of Labor believed AJB was becoming its own monster; not Monster.com, but a lowercase version with a burgeoning budget in some years over $25 million. The result: DOL plans to close AJB this week.

What now? The short answer for states is to partner with an AJB replacement site and Veterans compliance will soon be a non-issue.

But it’s important not to miss two other pieces of the picture revealed in the wake of AJB’s demise: 1) the US is much closer today, than ever, to a true national labor exchange one stop and 2) the national labor exchange that AJB pioneered is rapidly becoming a web of 40,000 US job sites.

AJB Replacement

AJB’s replacement has been in the works for some time. When the AJB death knell rang, the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) stepped up for its state members and skillfully steered toward a new wave of workforce technology. It was solicited by suitors and diligently vetted proposals for an AJB replacement. The result is a new and dynamic public/private partnership with a nonprofit association of over 250 leading U.S. employers called DirectEmployers Association.

DirectEmployers is led by Bill Warren, who many consider the father of the internet job board industry. In 1992, Warren created Online Career Center, the first employment site on the Internet, which later became the nucleus of Monster.com. More recently Warren went at it again, but this time with a model tied more tightly to his initial vision of creating the most efficient and cost effective internet solution for connecting employers and employees. He is now succeeding with a job board called JobCentral.

The JobCentral model is free for job seekers and inexpensive for employers. Employers can post a 30-day job-listing for only $25 or have access to the site’s resume database for a year for only $25. For employers in JobCentral partner states, job postings will soon be free. JobCentral is making the AJB transition easy for states as well, giving them free membership, duplicating the AJB interface and accepting existing data formats.

JobCentral’s network is large and rapidly expanding. It takes job posting feeds directly from employers at a lower cost than its big rivals and dynamically partners with many other sites. Partners include IBM, Home Depot, Pepsi and many other Fortune 500 companies. JobCentral’s online network has hundreds of sites, including job boards such as Google, Indeed, Jobster and Simply Hired as well as various newspapers and trade associations. The result is a one stop job posting network with millions of jobs.

To date, 32 states have signed up to partner with JobCentral. Many other states are close behind, making JobCentral a likely candidate to provide a real one stop for national labor exchange.

A second AJB replacement alternative is also gathering a network of state partners. NaviSite, a for-profit contractor that operated AJB for years, developed what it calls America’s Job Exchange, which also is free to job seekers and to employers who post with its state partners. So far, NaviSite has signed deals with more than a half-dozen states.

A True One Stop

The key to true one stop labor exchange is for all states to fully participate, exchanging both jobs and resumes with partners. Tight labor markets today demonstrate both a paradox and a compelling cause for this broad partnering. In many markets employers are clamoring to find workers, while unemployed workers are still taking three to four months to find employers. Where is the disconnect?

Currently, state job boards hold about one third of the active resumes of our unemployed. But they have less than 10% of the jobs. Nationwide, in 2006, that system left out over 50 million job openings for states’ job seekers to hopefully discover on their own.

In today’s market, state job boards will be hard pressed to ever gain more than 10% of the available jobs. First, they have tough competition consisting of 40,000 US job sites, each with their own marketing budget. For example, the marketing departments of Career Builder and Monster.com each spend over $150 million annually in addition to their wide networks of newspaper partnerships.

Second, no two employers are alike. Each knows exactly what works for them and rarely will one job board fit the majority of employers. The key then, for states trying to connect their jobseekers with more of the 50 million job openings, is not trying to be all things to all people. Instead states should leverage partnerships with JobCentral and the many other sites that employers now use. And they should allow job seekers the option for a one stop resume post to any partner that will upload their resume from a state site.

When job board connectivity reaches critical mass, it will drive dramatic improvements in efficiency and cost, giving job seekers and employers a wide variety of what they want when they want it. Consider other internet one stops. Instead of labor exchange, Ebay created a “stuff” exchange. Look at the results. Who’d have thought a guy in Poughkeepsie on a Tuesday at 1 a.m. could buy a collector’s quality Slinky from a pawnshop owner in San Fransisco’s Chinatown and have it show up at his doorstep in a day. What if labor exchange had a one stop as widely used and effective as Ebay?

Granted, labor exchange is different from stuff exchange. But if eHarmony can make marriages happen with the malady a personality mismatch could bring, imagine how today’s cutting edge technology will continue to develop, even beyond Resume Mirror’s parsing, WorkKeys’ certifications and Employon’s smart matching algorithms.

With 40,000 US job sites pursuing 60 million job connections each year the time is ripe for your state to be part of a dynamically evolving labor exchange one stop. JobCentral and many other partners are waiting to help.

By John W. Courtney, President, American Institute for Full Employment

www.fullemployment.org