I have had a number of reporters ask what is new and different with the JobCentral National Labor Exchange versus the “old” JobCentral. The differences are significant:

JobCentral National Labor Exchange allows job seekers to search jobs with one search across thousands of corporate web sites, Google, networking site Jobster, and leading Internet employment search engines such as Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Over five million (5,000,000) jobs are available to job seekers from corporate web sites, newspapers, trade associations, and other Internet sources in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, 230 major metropolitan areas, and all U.S. cities and postal zip code areas.

Job distribution to leading Internet search engines such as Google, Indeed.com, and SimplyHired.com plus Jobster.com and over 1000 other Internet sites including diversity, military, alumni, and state sites are available to all employers regardless of size in all industries.

JobCentral National Labor Exchange will offer extensive benefits free-of-charge to state workforce centers. Career OneStop Centers, counselors and other individuals who have Workforce Development responsibilities in each state will have access to jobs in their respective city, state, or region. Jobs will be available through state or federal government- approved job distribution sites, a link to the JobCentral site, or by providing the job search technology on the state’s employment center web site.

Jobs will also be available at no cost to each state via an Application Programming Interface (API), links from state web sites or via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). JobCentral will automatically place O*Net classification codes on all member-company jobs as is currently required by state workforce classification systems.

Bottom line is that JobCentral is now positioned to effectively play a major role in helping member companies meet their OFCCP, Veterans hiring and EEOC Affirmative Action requirements in addition to helping companies meet their general recruiting goals at a time we are all faced with an impending labor shortage.