New Web site serves Native employment

"People when they come here are usually stressed, depressed ... sometimes you'll ask one question and a woman will sit down and burst into tears," said Essie Rastopsoff, who works at Alaska's Finest Tours and Cruises at Fifth and Gambell.

The down-and-out often stop by Rastopsoff's office because her boss, Ben Goenett, also runs a company that gives welfare recipients federally subsidized cell phones for a dollar a month. It's just down the street from a job placement center and a downtown soup kitchen, so Goenett and his staff see a lot of people who are looking for work, many of them Alaska Natives.

"I find myself being a counselor as well as hooking up a phone for people because you have to have a phone for an employer to contact you," said Goenett, who is Tlingit. "These Natives keep coming in here, they don't know where to go (to find jobs), the word's not out there."

"I thought, 'OK something needs to be done.' "

What Goenett did was launch a new Web site called the Alaska Native Job Bank. Similar to job sites like monster.com or careerbuilder.com, the site lets employers post jobs and jobseekers browse listings and publish their resumes. What makes alaskanativejobs.com different is that it focuses only on companies that prioritize Alaska Native hire -- regional corporations, village corporations and other tribal groups, as well as their subsidiaries.

Various corporations and tribes have had job sites before, but Goenett said that this is the first site to put all the Native jobs in one place.

Goenett said that alaskanativejobs.com works better for employers because it allows them to browse by shareholder group, and allows jobseekers to state what their tribal affiliation is on their employee profile. That helps corporations prioritize shareholder or Alaska Native hire.

But the site isn't only for Natives. Often employers can't find a qualified shareholder or Alaska Native applicant and need to hire a non-Alaska Native candidate, and the site encourages non-Natives to apply.

"We welcome non-Natives," Goenett said. "We encourage non-Natives to apply because we need them."