Finally. Technology provider Adicio has stitched together 500-plus recruitment sites that it powers into a publicly available database, debuting today, called CareerCast.com. That’s about a half-million jobs today from some of the best niche job boards and newspapers across the U.S. and Canada. 

For job-seekers, it’s a new place to look for harder-to-find employment. For recruiters, it’s one-stop shopping for the niche sites relevant to specific careers. And for affiliates, it’s extended reach at no cost — and no downside.

Similar to the way aggregation sites work, when job-seekers click on a listing in CareerCast, they are directed to the originating job board. They apply there. Unlike aggregation sites, job-seekers can create an account on CareerCast, upload or create resumes and cover letters, and use their stored personal data to apply to jobs across the network. Their resumes are only visible to recruiters on the sites on which they apply.

Because there’s no central resume repository, resumes can’t be mined, as they are on sites such as Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs. Because recruiters buy ads on Adicio-powered job sites — through CareerCast but not from or on CareerCast — there are no sales teams out there selling the new portal. So there are no blurry rules of engagement — something that affiliates of the Big Three have to work through.

“Adicio clients get the page view, they get the apply, they get everything,” said Tony Lee, chief alliance officer and EVP of Adicio. “The whole goal is we’re driving traffic into the clients’ sites. … We’re not attempting to compete with clients in any way. We will not accept job postings to the portal, we will not have a resume database that’s searchable. Everything that happens on CareerCast.com drives back to the client.”

Adicio powers the recruitment platforms at newspapers including The Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal.com (Lee’s old haunts), The Arkansas Democrat (and all other Wehco papers), The Virginian-Pilot (and all other Landmark papers), The Vancouver Sun (and all other CanWest papers), the Cleveland Plain Dealer (and all other Advance papers) and many others. It provides the technology for Monster’s newspaper affiliates. Adicio also powers niche job boards for the global engineering association IEEE, the American Medical Association, Diversity Inc., and the Hollywood Reporter, among many others, as well as the TV station sites for Raycom and others. Recruiters can post jobs to any Adicio-powered sites that have enabled Adicio’s e-commerce features. That’s all but a handful.

“When I talked to HR folks, and I talked to quite a few, they sounded fairly excited that there’s a site that has all of these niche sites. And they defined newspapers as niche sites,” Lee said.

Newspapers as niches? It makes sense if you hire by function and location, which most recruiters do. And most job-seekers search by location and function. That means that while Adicio-powered niches span North America, search results for specific jobs might be a bit thin in some markets, especially those where the local newspaper isn’t powered by Adicio. But the results you find likely come from places you weren’t looking, which is sort of the point.

Job-seekers on CareerCast can save specific searches and create e-mail alerts, just as they can on any Adicio-powered site. There’s quite a bit of content, too, aimed at finding jobs and developing career skills. Some of the content is created by CareerCast but most of it is pulled from affiliates’ sites, including news articles and blogs on trends and advice. It’s updated daily by a producer Adicio hired to manage the site. “Everyday we’ll have different articles from different clients,” Lee said. “Our clients like this a lot because we’ll be driving editorial traffic to them.”

Recruiters on CareerCast can place jobs nationally — through WSJ’s CareerJournal — or by specific region and career niche. Multiple placements are handled in one order, one bill, one account on the portal site. After a recruiter places an ad, the Adicio client can  contact the recruiter for additional upsells — into national or regional buys, into print, into site spotlights or TopJobs, or into whatever combo programs it has available.

Recruiters who self-serve ads online are typically advertisers that newspapers or niche sites wouldn’t otherwise know to contact. “The best practice is, as soon as a job is posted in the database, you should call,” Lee said, and added that most clients, especially newspapers, are good at following up leads generated by e-commerce. “They’ve felt the pain and the fire is burning. They see each e-commerce listing as gold.”

So far, Lee said, clients have reacted positively to the new portal.

“It’s the best of both worlds: national exposure coupled with local job-seekers in a clean, intuitive layout that is easy to use for both employers and job-seekers,” said Chad Henderson, classified-operations coordinator for Tulsa World in Oklahoma. “Tulsa World has been continuously impressed with Adicio’s commitment to helping us grow traffic and revenue within the Careers vertical. We anticipate the launch of CareerCast.com to be a catalyst for both of these key areas, even while in the midst of a difficult employment climate.”

“This site exists solely to drive traffic and revenue to the clients. It does not generate a dollar of revenue from job postings or resumes or anything related,” Lee said. He added that CareerCast’s only direct-revenue source comes from recruitment-oriented ads from Google AdSense and inventory from both Monster’s and (blogger Joel Cheezman’s) Cheezhead.com‘s ad networks.

Adicio issues monthly payments to affiliates, along with monthly use reports. (Affiliates can also pull reports in real-time.) Adicio also manages credit-card verifications and validates the legitimacy of the jobs posted, culling out obvious scams and work-from-home schemes.

It also pulls salary-comparison data from PayScale.com, something Adicio has been doing with participating affiliates for about two years. And all Adicio’s partner sites’ logos are rotated on the home page for a little extra promotion.

“No client links to the portal,” Lee said. “The portal links to them.”

Granted, CareerCast affiliates aren’t likely to get the traffic lift affiliates of Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo HotJobs do. Those sites spend millions of dollars in promotion. Don’t look for CareerCast blimps or Super Bowl ads. But CareerCast does have a four-pronged promotion strategy:

• It’s applied the latest, greatest intelligence for search-engine optimization, Lee said.
• It’s paying for well-placed search-engine marketing.
• Adicio owns more than 30 recruitment-related domain names that already generate a quarter-million unique visitors, Lee said.
• It has an exclusive “jobs-rated” feature. The research used to be published by WSJ’s CareerJournal, back when Lee was at its helm. When WSJ dropped the feature, Lee grabbed it for CareerCast. Each month, it will publish a list of best-to-worst careers, based on stress, environment, pay and other factors. The list usually generates headlines. “The last time it came out, both Leno and Letterman used in their monologues,” Lee said, and added that several news organizations are already queued up for interviews or have already written stories embargoed for today’s debut of CareerCast. In fact, look for Lee on NBC’s Today Show this morning.

If the name, CareerCast, sounds familiar, it should. It was Adicio’s original company name. In 2004 the company branched beyond recruitment technology to real estate and automotive platforms. It changed the name to Adicio Media Solutions in April 2005. Adicio is based in Carlsbad, Calif. Lee is based in Princeton, N.J.

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