Cooper's Ferry Partnership launches online jobs portal

By Phaedra Trethan, August 6, 2019

CAMDEN — Cooper's Ferry Partnership, a Camden-based community development corporation, has launched an online jobs portal for job seekers in the region to search for employment opportunities nearby.

The site, https://coopersferry.com/job-opportunities, went live Tuesday, said Cooper's Ferry CEO Kris Kolluri.

The City of Camden is seeking an outside entity to handle its long-delayed Camden Works initiative.

Kolluri said the online portal, which is a tab on Cooper's Ferry main website, was a "first step" toward simplifying the process for job seekers in Camden, where companies including Subaru of America, Campbell's Soup, American Water, Holtec International and EMR have their corporate headquarters.

The site lists jobs at companies including Cooper University Hospital, CAMCare Health, Camden Yards Steel, the Coriell Institute, EMR, Holtec, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris Technologies, American Water, NFI, ResinTech, Virtua Health, Subaru and others. The site also includes links to jobs in state, city and county government and at Rutgers and Rowan universities and Camden County College.

Hopeworks 'N' Camden, a nonprofit which trains teens and young adults for careers in technology, added the portal to Cooper's Ferry's website, Kolluri said, working on a tight turnaround to get the site up and running quickly. More features will be added as well, he said.

In an Aug. 2 letter to Kevin Quinn, chairman of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, Camden Mayor Frank Moran provided an assessment of the city's employment landscape since the advent of the 2013 Economic Opportunity Act, which spurred a wave of development in Camden with tax incentives for companies willing to move to the city.

Moran was responding to Quinn's July 24 written request for information about specific data on companies that have benefited from the EOA and how many city residents they've hired.

"After 50 years of social and economic isolation, Camden is on a growth trajectory," Moran wrote. He pointed to Camden's 6.6 percent unemployment rate, near a 30-year low, and noted Camden's place as a regional jobs hub for South Jersey, especially for those who work in the medical and educational fields.

Moran also noted that a preliminary analysis by Cooper's Ferry found that more than 4,600 jobs have been added in Camden as of 2017 and at least 1,250 of those jobs went to Camden residents. He admitted, though, that the city "still has a lot of work to do compared to the state on the whole."