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New York finally gets SMART

Published: Oct 15, 2009

Introduced yesterday, a new tool from, of all places, the New York State Department of Labor will help provide state residents with viable daily job leads. An unemployed worker must first go to one of the department's One-Stop Career Centers, where a counselor will enter the resume into the Skills Matching and Referral Technology (SMART) 2010 system. (Guess it's not a totally digital process, but whatever.) The program then actively matches a candidate with job opportunities after "reading" the resume, taking into account skills and experience (not just the usual keyword signifiers), and also searches for openings that match the skillset but which the job seeker may have overlooked as outside the realm of possibility. Job hunters are promised an email every day, each containing up to 10 jobs.

Naturally, for those hopeful applicants, success depends on what jobs are living in the NYS DoL database at any moment, so positive matches are far from guaranteed. But we thank NYS DoL nonetheless for doing more than their part. Now, if only they could bump up the $405 maximum weekly benefit to a level more conducive to survival in New York City…

--Posted by Todd Obolsky, Vault Staff Writer

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