Big Firms Team Up For a New Kind Of Job Board

Several Fortune 500 companies are banding together to create a free job board that will give users access to all their jobs.

The site is called United We Work and launched yesterday with sponsorship from Sears, AT&T, ADP, Allstate, Hewitt Associates, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, Office Depot, 7-Eleven and Starbucks. The site is free for up to a year for other companies posting positions and will remain free for job seekers.

"If we can stimulate an employer to make a hire now, that's going to help get this hiring process back," said Jason Kerr, chief technology officer of QuietAgent, which powers the site.

Kerr said that the site has about 350,000 jobs in its database and that he hopes to increase the listings to 500,000 by the end of the week. He said the jobs are culled from corporate Web sites.

QuietAgent had helped some of the country's biggest companies about a year ago to create a network to share job applicants, Kerr said. Here's how it worked: Sears might get 100 applications for a single job posting. Once it has filled the slot, it could pass on the other 99 applications to other companies in the network. Sears could also access other companies' unhired applicants.

But that network was designed for fee-paying recruiters, Kerr said. United We Work uses a similar database but allows job seekers to post their résumés and search for positions. Large companies can sign up to post positions free until the end of the year, while small businesses can access it for free until July 2010.

It's competitive out there. Wisebread offers good tips on how to get the most out of your job search, including finding key words and tracking which companies are hiring. And if you want to get really Web 2.0 with it, BioJobBlog has a guide on using Twitter to find a job.

-- Ylan Q. Mui

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/13/AR2009071303205.html