Job-Date? New Website aims at making Jewish career matches

Do you want to be a network engineer? Want to work at The Jewish Museum? Or be CEO of a Yiddish theater? These are just some of the jobs available on www.Jewishcareers.com, a new Website advertising career opportunities.

The site, created by Alter Jewish Media and www.Jobtarget.com, has been online since March. It provides listings for Jewish-interest jobs across the country and a search tool for those seeking them.

Alter Communications hired Jobtarget, which provides the search technology for some 300 other job boards, to provide the practical underpinnings for the site, according to Jack Ross, the director of advertising for Alter Communications, which owns the Baltimore Jewish Times. Several Jewish newspapers, including The Jewish Standard, are participating in the site. Those papers are funneling job listings to the site, and providing links to Jewishcaereers.com on their newspapers’ Websites in an effort to reach a wide geographic range, from Baltimore to New York to Detroit to Phoenix and Chicago. (The Standard’s Web address is www.jstandard.com.)

"It’s a good service for the readers of these papers," Ross said.

Andrew Buerger, the publisher of Alter Communications, sees the site as a way to combat growing assimilation within the Jewish community.

"There is a great deal of assimilation and people are becoming less Jewish," he said. "At the same time, the people who are remaining in the Jewish community are getting more and more involved. So the need for Jewish infrastructure is actually growing, but there is a real lack of Jewish communal workers."

Buerger’s research led him to Jobtarget.com, which, he says, "has all the bells and whistles of Monster.com or careerbuilder.com."

But it is the partnership of several different Jewish press outlets that makes this job site different than other job sites, Ross said, because each paper is promoting the site. "You can have the greatest site in the world but if nobody knows it’s there, it doesn’t help you," he said.

Flo Eckstein, publisher of the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, put a listing for a sales manager on the site a month ago. Although she has not yet filled the position, she is pleased with the response she has received. While other Jewish jobs sites tend to focus on communal work, Jewishcareers.com is open to an array of different types of jobs, Eckstein said, "It looks to me like it’s going to be a winner."

Jewishcareers.com, however, is not meant just to help fill jobs, it is aimed at building Jewish careers, according to Ross. While part-time positions aren’t turned away from the listings, Ross wants the site to attract people looking to work full time for a federation, synagogue, or other larger Jewish organization. There is no cost for job-seekers to post resum?s or search the database; there is a charge for employers to post openings and read resum?s.

"Ours will be the site where you can find those career-changing positions," Ross said.

"I don’t think it’ll ever be a Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com, but our hope is it will be the premier site for Jewish careers."