Online Headhunter Eases Job Search

An online job search site in Texas is giving the unemployed another way to look for work and making the job hunt a little easier.

Since Hire Texas debuted in August on the Texas Workforce Commission's (TWC) World Wide Web site, www.twc.state.tx.us, more than 1,600 Texas employers have signed up for free accounts on the site. Additionally, more than 300 job seekers from all over the world register daily, along with more than 150 job orders from employers.

The site works like this:

People looking for work fill out online applications and submit them for review by potential employers. Even people who haven't filled out applications can scan the help wanted ads through a customized "speed search."

On the employer side, companies enter job vacancies that also are automatically routed to America's Job Bank. Then they search the applicant database for matches, and the site provides them with a ranked list of qualified people.

"There's no reason in this electronic age [that] an employer or job seekers should have to go to an office and file a piece of paper," said Larry Jones, the commission's director of communications.

The commission worked with the state's local work force development board to promote the site, although job seekers also have discovered it through Web searches and word-of- mouth.

The system, an IBM Corp. S/390 server, cost $140,000 and was paid for with federal work force development funds. It replaces a 25-year-old manual process. In the past, TWC employees solicited job orders from businesses and manually entered them into a database. To apply for positions, applicants had to go to local government offices to fill out applications.

Next, the commission would like to add an application to process quarterly tax returns and report wages.