By Jonathan Allen | August 6, 2009 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The House ethics committee is lawyering up and Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, D-N.Y., has been looking for a press secretary, according to a new Web site established by young black political and business pros that integrates a traditional job bank with social networking and media tools such as YouTube to help put more minorities in Washington jobs.

For years, minorities have contemplated ways of increasing their numbers and influence in the nation’s capital. The problems have been easy to identify: A recent study by the Congressional Black Caucus revealed that black committee chairmen are far more likely than their white counterparts to hire black staff.

But the solutions have been harder to come by. A lot of talented minds have been working on the issue: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., hired Martina Bradford to run a staff diversity initiative in 2007, a set of successful black K Street lobbyists that refers to its members as “The Working Group” has been meeting on a quarterly basis, and Glover Park Group lobbyist Joyce Brayboy runs a group of African Ameican women.

The five organizers of the nonprofit Impact hope its bells-and-whistles-laden new interactive job bank will become the premier clearinghouse for putting employers in touch with qualified minority candidates and flagging opportunities for job-seekers.

“We want to ensure that members who want to hire people of color have access to qualified candidates,” said Angela Rye, a co-founder of Impact who is a senior policy adviser and counsel to the House Homeland Security Committee. “Our end goal is to empower our peers, our generation.”

The Web site, which had its official launch party last Thursday, has an easy-to-use interface that allows job candidates to create a downloadable online resume. It also gives a candidate space to post an “elevator pitch” video from YouTube to explain — in an elevator-ride-length segment — why they should be hired. Other features include a Facebook-like capacity for “connecting” with other members of the site.

The Impact group and its site are not limited to minorities or to Capitol Hill, though those are areas of focus.

“All of our events have been inclusive,” said Joe D. Briggs, a board member who manages the National Football League Players Association’s Financial Programs Division.

The other three board members are White House aide Adria Crutchfield, David J. Johns, who works as an education policy adviser for the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, and Ryan M. Scott, the chief operating officer of Jade Private Wealth Management.

Impact has 25,000 people on its listserv, according to Rye and Briggs, and they hope that means the site will fill up quickly with resumes.

“This is us reaching out to Capitol Hill to say ‘Here’s a place you may be able to go to find qualified candidates,” Briggs said. Without such a clearinghouse, he said, “people you may have a need for may not know that you have an opportunity for them.”

Rye said the effort will be successful if in the future it has “changed the face of Capitol Hill so that it looks like America.”