New York Times, Community Connect Join Forces On Job Ads

In a move that underscores the jockeying for position occurring in the online classified ads market, New York Times Job Market, which comprises the newspaper’s online and offline jobs offerings, and ethnic publisher Community Connect (CCI) are teaming to help meet recruiters’ needs to hire a diverse workforce.

With their new joint offering, called Diversity Job Market and launching October 14, the companies will provide a database of job candidates from the Asian American, African American and Hispanic communities. The database will be populated through information gathered on Community Connect’s Web sites, AsianAvenue.com, MiGente.com, and BlackPlanet.com, and the partners expect to have, by the end of its first month in operation, 300,000 fresh profiles of diverse job seekers and more than 9 million members.

The move represents The New York Times’ effort to maintain and improve its position in the job classified ads front, a position that in recent years has been eroded by popular online players like TMP Worldwide’s Monster.com and Yahoo’s HotJobs.com. That deterioration of newspapers’ market share is, in part, what has fueled deals like publisher Gannett’s recently announced investment in CareerBuilder.com. Another trend in the area has been for players to become increasingly niche focused, a shift exemplified by Monster.com’s efforts to go after localized markets with its JobMatch regional initiative. To some extent, the New York Times Job Market and Community Connect partnership also illustrates this niche focus. Ethnic audiences, however, are becoming a larger part of the U.S. population as a whole, a trend evidenced by the 2000 census, another reason the partnership was likely attractive to both parties.

“The power of Diversity Job Market stems from the combined strength of The New York Times Job Market and Community Connect Inc. to create a new, unique stand-alone Web destination that leverages CCI’s member loyalty and database expertise with the marketing reach of The New York Times Job Market,” said Alexis Buryk, group vice president of advertising sales, The New York Times.

Sales and marketing for the effort will be undertaken by the New York Times Job Market and Community Connect, while CCI will be promoting registration through its sites. While the joint site will offer hiring managers, employment agencies, and recruiters traditional tools such as sponsorships, corporate profile pages, and job postings, it will also offer subscriptions for access to the database. Subscriptions will run for three-, six-, or twelve-month periods, and the data will be refreshed every three months.

The site will be accessible via diversityjobmarket.com, and through NYTimes.com, where it will benefit from that site’s reach.