Kasich announces plans for jobs site

By Marc Kovac | April 16, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

COLUMBUS

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is hoping to boost the number of businesses and unemployed residents who use the state’s online jobs board.

Gov. John Kasich announced plans Friday to increase the marketing and promotion of the site, OhioMeansJobs.com, a joint effort of the state and Internet employment site Monster.com.

“Ohio has the most-unique relationship with Monster in the country,” Kasich said. “Monster is willing to post job openings that exist in our state. Today, they’ve got about 66,000 job openings [in Ohio].”

Ohioans seeking employment can register on the site, search job openings and post their r sum s. And Ohio businesses can post job openings and search through r sum s for potential future employees.

It’s not a new system. Monster.com actually has been paid about $2.5 million a year in federal funding for the past several years to run the jobs site, which Kasich said was mismanaged by the previous administration.

“It was good that the state created this relationship, but the state has done nothing, nothing at all, to promote this relationship,” Kasich said. “So only about 2,000 companies actually are using this site, with a potential for 200,000 companies that could access this site. They can post their job openings, and they then can draw down the r sum s off the Monster site to fit their openings.”

The announcement Friday came on the same day that new statewide unemployment statistics were released. For the month of March, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.9 percent from 9.2 percent in February. A total of 526,000 Ohioans still are unemployed, down from 542,000 in February.

“We’re still too darn high,” Kasich said of those results. “We’ve lost 600,000 jobs. We’re working on all this to get this fixed.”

He added later, “The news is, to those that don’t have a job or to those that are underemployed, we’re giving you the tools to improve your life. We’re giving you the tools to help your family. We’re giving you the tools to give yourself a real chance.”