New site turns job hunt into one-stop shopping

Several Fortune 500 companies are banding together to create a free new job board that will give users access to all their jobs with just one application.

The website is called United We Work and launched Monday with sponsorship from Sears Holdings Corp., AT&T; Inc., Automatic Data Processing Inc., Allstate Corp., Hewitt Associates, Global Hyatt Corp., Office Depot, 7-Eleven Inc. and Starbucks Coffee Co. The site is free for up to a year for other companies seeking to post positions and will always be free for job seekers.

“If we can stimulate an employer to make a hire now, that’s going to help get this hiring process back,” said Jason Kerr, founder and chief technology officer of QuietAgent Inc., which is powering the site.

Kerr said that the site had about 350,000 jobs in its database and that he hoped to increase the listings to 500,000 by the end of the week. He said the jobs are culled only from corporate websites to help ensure their legitimacy.

QuietAgent helped some of the country’s biggest companies about a year ago to create a network to share job applicants, Kerr said.

Here’s how it worked: Sears might get 100 applications for a single job posting. Once it filled the slot, it could pass along the other 99 applications to other companies in the network. Sears could also access other companies’ leftover applications to search for qualified people.

That network was designed only for company recruiters who pay a fee, Kerr said. United We Work uses a similar database but allows job seekers to post their resumes to the site and search for positions. Large companies can sign up to post positions free of charge until the end of the year; small businesses can access it free until July 2010.

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Mui writes for the Washington Post.