America’s Job Bank Gets Laid Off
The U.S. Labor Department plans to close America’s Job Bank�the national online job board�in a little more than a year, a move that could hurt employers and job seekers.
The Labor Department sent notices to state officials earlier this year saying “the benefits of AJB (America’s Job Bank) no longer outweigh the costs of operating and maintaining this system. Therefore, AJB will be phased out during the next 18 months and cease to be operational on June 30, 2007.”
But shutting down America’s Job Bank will be a major blow to employers and job seekers, says Gerry Crispin, co-founder of job-site consulting firm CareerXroads. Crispin says the site has been a way to aggregate all the job postings of some 2,000 state employment offices around the country, giving smaller, local employers the ability to broadcast their jobs nationwide for free. And the AJB site is often used by lower-skilled people who turn to state employment offices. Those people may have to rely on a fragmented network of state job sites or private-sector job boards that will not have all the job listings that employers currently give to America’s Job Bank, Crispin says.
“We are basically losing a public resource that provides job seekers a more convenient and easy way to identify the employers who were local and had smaller budgets,” he says.
America’s Job Bank dates to 1995, and the free site currently lists more than 2.1 million jobs and more than 682,000 résumés. But it has been criticized as difficult to use. The Labor Department said in a notice that the cost of operating AJB has been as high as $27 million per year, but that “AJB has not been able to keep up with private-sector job boards or industry standards regarding up-to-date technology.”
READ: America’s Job Bank Gets Laid Off
Hmm… What a GOLDEN opportunity for a careersite to take advantage of. I wonder who will step to the challenge?
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