Want to find a job? Nonprofit '.jobs' service seeks to revolutionize the search.

It was considered good news when the national unemployment rate dropped by 0.4 percentage points to 9.4 percent in December.

But many employment experts suggest even better news for job seekers – and a development that might help drop that unemployment figure even further – is the announcement Tuesday that many of America’s Fortune 500 companies have joined with Monster.com founder Bill Warren to revolutionize the way companies and needed employees find each other.

Mr. Warren, who founded Monster, one of the leading Internet career sites, in 1992, is now spearheading a nonprofit job listing system called .jobs that aims to eliminate the middlemen for job seekers and the high cost of job postings for companies.

Mr. Warren hopes the new job listing system will be a vital tool in lowering the national unemployment rate, not just through the ease it gives to both seekers and finders, but because the new idea will also vastly expand the number of jobs listed. The idea is attracting kudos from those who study the industry.

“If Warren and his company get some traction then it will transform the market for job seekers and employers,” says Steve Langerud, director of professional opportunities at DePauw University in Indiana and a workplace consultant who has worked with over 15,000 people on organizational and career issues.

Time for a new model

"It will add nuance to the advertised job market, engage employers who simply did not participate, and, best of all, provide some tangible hope to job seekers who don't see themselves in other products.”

Warren himself calls this an inevitable evolution. He observed the pay-for-placement model that he pioneered simply get too expensive. He says he knew it was time for a new model when there was talk at his old company of pushing the price of a single job listing to $1,000. “The price for a company to actually post all its open jobs would be in the millions,” he says. The typical cost today is nearly $400, “which means that for most companies, only about ten percent of their open jobs actually get listed.”

In the new model, companies can list their job openings without charge, he says. Companies can pay $15,000 to join the non-profit and receive additional services, such as tracking and integrated social media.

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