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Collaborative launches statewide social services jobs website

People seeking North Carolina social services jobs no longer have to pore through 100 county websites.

Now, thanks to the N.C. Child Welfare Workforce Collaborative at the UNC School of Social Work, there is a central online solution — the N.C. Social Services Jobs Registry.

The registry provides a database of currently available social services jobs in North Carolina. Social service agencies statewide can post their job openings. Site visitors can view the posted jobs, and search based on location, title and salary. They can even view county profiles to learn more about the area where a job is located.

The site was designed and developed in-house by the N.C. Child Welfare Workforce Collaborative, a project housed in the UNC School of Social Work and funded through a cooperative agreement with the Children’s Bureau. The purpose of the Collaborative project is to identify and address workforce issues in child welfare in North Carolina. One issue identified was the lack of a central registry for available jobs in social services in the state.

Previously, counties had few ways to find job candidates and similarly, there was no easy way for job seekers to learn about vacancies in county departments of social services (DSS) or in the state-level Division of Social Services. This was especially true for rural areas. But the new registry helps resolve that workforce issue.

Collaborative Principal Investigator Evelyn Williams and Project Director Selena Childs have been busy getting the word out to all 100 county DSS offices so that the registry’s job database can grow. On Oct. 27, they officially launched the site by presenting it at the DSS directors’ breakfast at the Social Services Institute in Hickory.

The response from the DSS directors was overwhelmingly positive. “We have gotten a lot of support to move forward and partner with us,” said Williams.
The site’s first visitors also found it easy to use — an important goal of the project’s developers. “One director described herself as ‘technology challenged’ but found it very easy to enter data,” Williams said.