Chamber promoting national employment service

With the unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent in Carson City, its lowest rate since 1970, area employers are turning to the national labor market, especially for more technical positions.

The question is: How to get that engineer in Chicago or medical technician in Cleveland to even check for an opening here?

Using the Internet is an obvious route, but the specific choices are not. One survey of "electronic recruiters" picked the top 100 out of 15,000 possibilities. They included sites where job openings can be listed for free, services that can cost a company thousands of dollars a year and Web addresses designed for specific groups of professionals.

The Carson City Area Chamber of Commerce has aligned itself with one Internet employment service, NationJob Network, that is targeting businesses affiliated with chambers nationwide as it expands out of the Midwest.

Carson chamber members have been invited to an 8 a.m. meeting Wednesday at the Ormsby House to learn about the NationJob Community Service Program.

"Recruiting qualified employees has become an issue everywhere in the country," chamber executive vice president Larry Osborne said. "The nation has practically full employment, so we are competing with businesses in the states around us, too."

Osborne said NationJob (www.nationjob.com) has contracts with chambers of commerce in Dayton, Ohio; Wichita, Kan.; Oshkosh, Wisc.; Detroit, Mich., and Memphis, Tenn., among others.

"They contacted us. They're getting more aggressive about coming out West," Osborne said of the Internet labor recruiter.

He said chamber member companies can pay an annual subscription fee that allows posting an unlimited number of jobs to NationJob's database. The price also includes a Web page with an individual profile of the local company and other recruiting-related services.

The annual cost will start at $1,450, depending on a company's size, Osborne said. "That's the cost of one 'help wanted ad' in the L.A. Times," he said.

Internet recruiting should not be seen as a replacement to other job-filling efforts, but as a supplement, Osborne said.

Though NationJob does not have the name recognition of Internet job listing giant The Monster Board (www.monster.com), Osborne said the service is well established in recruitment in specialized fields.

"Just do a Net search for engineer jobs and their name will come up," Osborne said.

In fact, a quick test of that for five states by the Nevada Appeal backed Osborne up.

Using the GoTo search engine, a search for "job engineer Michigan" turned up NationJob listings in third and fourth places. The same search for Kansas had NationJob listings in first and 21st places, for Oregon it was second and 21st, for Wisconsin a NationJob listing was second, and NationJob listings were first and 14th for Ohio.

On the other hand, a search for jobs in Nevada on the NationJob site produced 235 job listings, 213 of which were for national or regional recruitments. Of the 22 jobs actually listed in Nevada, 11 were for Las Vegas and two for Carson City.

The Dayton Chamber of Commerce Web Site explains that the NationJob service is available free to its members and lists a retail value of $2,500-$5,400 per year for the benefit.