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Job hunting in cyberspace Medford, big employers pay to post local positions on Internet BY DAVID PRESZLER Medford employers will soon be able to offer one-stop cyberclassifieds to a broad audience -- by posting job openings on the Internet. The Chamber of Medford/Jackson County will establish a community Web page for help-wanted ads on the NationJob Network. NationJob (www.nationjob.com) is an Des Moines, Iowa-based company that says its Web site gets 15 million hits per month. "We see the advantage of helping people find jobs here and helping companies find qualified employees to fill those jobs," says Bill Haas, the chamber's executive director. The service, slated to begin next month, will cost Medford $25,000 a year (the fee varies with size of the community). Initially, the service will be focused on Medford but it may be expanded to include the rest of the Rogue Valley as well, Haas said. On Thursday, the city committed $5,000 a year for the service. Three of the area's largest employers -- Bear Creek Corp., Asante Health Systems and Providence Medford Medical Center -- will share the rest of the expense, at least for the first year. The chamber won't contribute to the cost but will coordinate the effort and provide staff support. Haas says the service will be open to businesses throughout the Rogue Valley, though a fee may be charged to help spread the expense fairly among the companies that use it. The exact details of how it will work are still being hammered out. "The key to it will be participation," Haas says. "We want to make it as accessible as possible." A kick-off event has been scheduled for July 22 and Haas is hoping to have some of the first job listings on the Web site by then. While many sites offer companies the chance to post openings online, NationJob says it's the only large player to offer entire communities the chance to post listings together. Thirty-three communities or counties and one state (Arkansas) have listings on the Web site. Most community customers are in the Midwest but the company has just launched a West Coast expansion plan and Medford is the first community west of the Rockies to sign up for the service. Barbara McIntosh, operations manager for NationJob, said the company began offering the community service at the request of chambers of commerce in Iowa. While many communities have Web pages with job listings, McIntosh says the number of visitors that her company's site gets yields much more impressive results. "Anybody can put a page up, getting the traffic is the key to it," she says. And the traffic is what sold chamber and city officials on the service. "It puts us in a national and international arena," said Medford City Manager Michael Dyal, adding that the city's Web page will be featured with NationJob as well. "It creates a much bigger universe to put the word out in." "We see it as a very positive economic development tool," says Haas. Haas and Dyal said the hope is that the service will help employers find workers for hard-to-fill positions. Economic development experts agree that access to a qualified workforce is a major factor in whether companies move into the area and whether existing ones stay and grow. NationJob's "flagship" feature is designed to match those highly skilled employees with jobs. The P.J. Scout feature allows job seekers to fill out a form about the type of job they'd be interested in and then e-mails the job seekers with matches in the company's listings database. McIntosh says P.J. Scout, which has information from more than 350,000 job seekers, helps employers get at a hard-to-find but extremely sought-after type of worker: The casual job seeker who's already employed and only looking for the "right" opportunity. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA