The competition for talent in public media is heating up. Nonprofits covet your development staff for their membership expertise. Newspapers, digital startups and podcasting companies are poaching your audio and video producers. We need to work together to ensure that people of diverse backgrounds experience public media as a welcoming, inclusive, vibrant industry.
Drizin
Current is doing its part to make that a reality. We’ve always been the No. 1 source for public media jobs, thanks to the many stations that regularly post open positions on our career site, and to Livingston Associates for tapping Current in its executive recruitment efforts. And Current is committed to connecting diverse talent to diverse opportunities in public media. It’s why we participated in the Public Media Village at last year’s joint conference of the National Associations of Black and Hispanic Journalists and why we produced and widely distributed special coverage on diversity in public media. (Print copies of this insert are still available for $5 — call us!)
Now we’re taking these efforts a step further. We’re changing the domain for our career center to publicmediajobs.org to boost our visibility as a resource for job-seekers and make the site even easier to find in an online search. Please bookmark that URL and share it with your HR folks. When you send letters to applicants who didn’t get hired, why not encourage them to keep looking on publicmediajobs.org? This kind of message reinforces public media as inclusive, vibrant and full of opportunities.
Another example of Current’s innovative leadership in this area is the Public Media Virtual Career Fairs that launched this year. This new initiative helps job-seekers and recruiters from all over the country make human connections online. We promoted these fairs heavily in social media and, with help from NPR, reached attendees of this year’s industry gatherings for media makers of color, including the NABJ and Asian American Journalists Association.
Sixteen public media organizations participated in our Sept. 14 fair, where for over three hours HR personnel hosted virtual booths and answered questions about the work culture and hiring processes at their organizations. Many recruiters engaged in a nonstop series of 10-minute text chats with dozens of the 200 curious candidates in attendance.
I want to especially thank WNYC in New York City for being our lead sponsor, and WGBH in Boston, the Independent Television Service and PBS for joining at the Gold level. Their support helped cover the cost of the online platform, keeping the event free to jobseekers and reducing the fees to participating stations in smaller markets.
Current will host another virtual career fair next March. The exact date is to be announced, but the Early Bird deadline will be in February. That’s when soon-to-be college graduates ramp up their job searches. Again, we are seeking lead sponsors to help make this happen and make it accessible to all. And we invite more stations to join us as exhibitors. Public media needs all the talent we can get throughout the system. Current is here to help.