Charlotte Area Liaison Group (CALG)

News Updates

1. America’s Job Bank Gets Laid Off

2. EEO-1 Report Revision Notice

America’s Job Bank Gets Laid Off

The pioneering government-run national job board will shut down next year. AJB has been criticized by the Department of Labor as not competitive with private-sector Web sites.

May 10, 2006

America’s Job Bank Gets Laid Off

The U.S. Labor Department plans to close America’s Job Bank—the national online job board—in a little more than a year, a move that could hurt employers and job seekers.

The Labor Department sent notices to state officials earlier this year saying "the benefits of AJB (America’s Job Bank) no longer outweigh the costs of operating and maintaining this system. Therefore, AJB will be phased out during the next 18 months and cease to be operational on June 30, 2007."

But shutting down America’s Job Bank will be a major blow to employers and job seekers, says Gerry Crispin, co-founder of job-site consulting firm CareerXroads. Crispin says the site has been a way to aggregate all the job postings of some 2,000 state employment offices around the country, giving smaller, local employers the ability to broadcast their jobs nationwide for free. And the AJB site is often used by lower-skilled people who turn to state employment offices. Those people may have to rely on a fragmented network of state job sites or private-sector job boards that will not have all the job listings that employers currently give to America’s Job Bank, Crispin says.

"We are basically losing a public resource that provides job seekers a more convenient and easy way to identify the employers who were local and had smaller budgets," he says.

America’s Job Bank dates to 1995, and the free site currently lists more than 2.1 million jobs and more than 682,000 résumés. But it has been criticized as difficult to use. The Labor Department said in a notice that the cost of operating AJB has been as high as $27 million per year, but that "AJB has not been able to keep up with private-sector job boards or industry standards regarding up-to-date technology."

The slated closure of America’s Job Bank could force both companies and states to change the way they do business. Idaho, for example, enticed employers to list jobs on its state job bank with the promise that the listings would get on the better-known America’s Job Bank site.

"We’ve used the national distribution of job postings through AJB as a promotion," says Bob Fick, communications manager at the Idaho Commerce and Labor Department.

America’s Job Bank also has been used by companies as a way to abide by the guidelines of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recruiting analyst Peter Weddle wrote in an online newsletter last month.

"Because this site was operated in conjunction with state employment agencies and open to all U.S. citizens, posting an opening there was a de facto commitment by the organization to consider any qualified person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion or sexual orientation," Weddle wrote. "The openings may have also been posted on other job boards or on the employer’s own Web site, but as long as candidates from America’s Job Bank were considered, the government was (usually) content that the company had made a conscientious effort at compliance."

An alternative for demonstrating a good-faith effort at EEOC compliance, Weddle wrote, is posting jobs on a variety of sites, including general-purpose employment sites and "diversity" sites such as those that specialize in candidates of a particular race.

One notice sent to state officials said that during the past two years, the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration had reviewed and evaluated the ongoing viability of maintaining a national job site. "Since the launch of AJB, the number of private-sector Internet-based job boards (Career Builder, Monster, Yahoo! Hot Jobs, etc.) has proliferated, calling into question the need for a Federal government-sponsored job board," the notice said.

"Since the launch of AJB, the number of private-sector Internet-based job boards (CareerBuilder, Monster, Yahoo Hot Jobs, etc.) has proliferated, calling into question the need for a federal government-sponsored job board," the notice later said. "The cost of operating AJB has been as high as $27 million per year, with a current operating budget for maintenance-only of $12 million per year.... The cost to maintain AJB and constantly upgrade the foundational technology and make improvements to the site is no longer justifiable given that AJB duplicates what is already available in the private sector."

The notice, titled "The Phase Out of America’s Job Bank," said the Labor Department has developed an initial transition plan "to ensure that states and other entities, which currently utilize the AJB platform as part of their suite of services, are able to plan and make changes accordingly."

It also indicated that the federal government could contract with a private-sector employment Web site to create some kind of national job board in the future.

"The (Labor) Department recognizes there will be a periodic need for a national job board due to unique circumstances, such as the recent dislocations related to the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast," the notice said. "It is the Department’s assessment that it will be more cost effective to contract for this type of service with the private sector on an ‘as needed basis.’ "

In addition to this notice, the Labor Department also sent state officials a set of questions and answers about the phase-out.

Workforce Management received copies of the two notices from Ted Daywalt, president of private-sector job board VetJobs. Daywalt said he received the notices from a contact who works in the U.S. Labor Department, and that the documents were sent to state officials. Daywalt declined to identify his contact. The U.S. Department of Labor did not immediately respond to requests to confirm the documents. But state officials in both Idaho and Arkansas confirmed they had received the notices.

Although the demise of AJB amounts to a headache for Idaho state officials, it is a relatively minor one, Fick says. Of greater concern, he says, are cutbacks in federal grants for programs such as unemployment insurance and workforce training. "It’s another problem, but in a long list of problems," he says.

In Crispin’s opinion, the loss of America’s Job Bank adds to the economic insecurities faced by many Americans, and is likely the result of political lobbying.

"It’s simple greed on the part of job boards and newspapers who have always feared that a free site will hurt them." But, he says, the end of America’s Job Bank may not help fee-based sites such as Monster or CareerBuilder so much as boost the activity on free job listing sites.

"It’ll probably help Craigslist," he says.

--Ed Frauenheim

Workforce Management editorial researcher Yasi Jahed contributed to this report.

EEO-1 Report Revision Notice

(posted May 16, 2006 on http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/ofccp/eeo1rpt.htm)

Beginning in 2007, employers, including Federal contractors, will collect and report data about the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of their workforces on a revised Standard Form 100, Employer Information Report EEO-1. The existing EEO-1 report calls for workforce data to be broken down by nine job categories, using five race and ethnic categories. The revised EEO-1 report contains changes to the race and ethnic categories. A new category titled "two or more races" has been added, and the category "Asian or Pacific Islander" has been divided into two separate categories - "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders." In addition, the approved revisions to the EEO-1 report include an increase in the number of job categories as a result of dividing the Officials and Managers category into two subgroups - Executives/ Senior Level and First/Mid Level Officials. These and other changes to the EEO-1 report are discussed in the Federal Register notice published on November 28, 2005 (70 FR 71294), which is available on EEOC's website at http://www.eeoc.gov/eeo1/index.html.

The revised EEO-1 report must be filed for the first time in calendar year 2007 by September 30, 2007. Employers are to continue using the current format for calendar year 2006 EEO-1 report submissions.

The regulations implementing Executive Order 11246 require contractors to collect, maintain, and report information about the gender, race, and ethnicity of their employees. The race and ethnic categories specified in the current Executive Order regulations - Blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives - are the same categories used on the current EEO-1 report form, and found in the standards for the classification of Federal data on race and ethnicity issued in 1977. The 1977 standards have since been superseded by the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity issued by the Office of Management and Budget in 1997 (62 FR 58782)(hereinafter "1997 Revised Standards").

Federal data collection and reporting requirements that include racial and ethnic information are required to be consistent with the 1997 Revised Standards. Thus, the revised EEO-1 report adopts race and ethnic categories that are in line with the 1997 Revised Standards. Likewise, changes must be made to the race and ethnic categories specified in the regulations implementing Executive Order 11246 to conform to the 1997 Revised Standards.

During the public comment period on the proposed revisions to the EEO-1 report, OFCCP announced its intention to coordinate its data collection and reporting requirements with the changes to EEO-1 report to avoid imposing inconsistent burdens on the Federal contractor community. OFCCP has started an internal review to identify regulatory changes that may be necessary. In addition to the changes to race and ethnic categories, the revisions to the EEO-1 job categories may also necessitate changes in the regulations implementing Executive Order 11246. Any changes to OFCCP's data collection and reporting requirements to incorporate the 1997 Revised Standards and the EEO-1 report revisions will be published in the Federal Register for public comment. Moreover, OFCCP will provide Federal contractors a reasonable transition period before any regulatory changes become effective.