In a few months, the Yukon government will cease funding for the territory’s largest online job board, YuWIN.

Rick Karp, the president of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce and vice-chair of YuWIN’s board of directors, said today the funding cut will be a huge loss to the Yukon’s business community.

The website, he told the Star, gets approximately 60,000 in-depth searches a month.

In 2015 alone, it had 3.5 million hits – and not just from the Yukon, but nationwide and outside Canada as well.

“It’s a shame that we could potentially lose such a positive force for the Yukon business community,” Karp said.

YuWIN receives funding from the Department of Education’s advanced learning branch.

Board members first received notice of an impending funding cut a few months ago, but a formal email was distributed a week or two ago, Karp said.

As of March 31, the YuWIN job board will lose Yukon government’s funding.

Karp’s understanding of the rationale for the cut is that the Department of Education handles Canada’s Job Bank in Yukon.

The Government of Canada’s Job Bank has a search option to find Yukon jobs.

Karp, however, argues that it’s not the ideal option for small Yukon businesses looking for employees.

As a business owner himself, Karp said every employee he and his wife, Joy, have hired has been through YuWIN.

“That’s the first one that we think of to post a job,” he said.

The Job Bank, spanning all of Canada, isn’t as locally-focused as Yukon-only YuWIN.

Searches for certain jobs on the Job Bank located in Whitehorse yield fewer results than on YuWIN.

For employers, posting on the Job Bank isn’t as efficient as YuWIN, Karp said.

When posting to the national board, he said, the posting will say it’s “pending.”

“It could be a week or two for the job to go up,” he said.

“YuWIN is very quick.”

Now that the ball has dropped and the funding cut is imminent, YuWIN will be looking into finding another host for the job board.

“We really need that job board to be up and running,” Karp said.

In addition to local job postings, YuWIN’s website provides information about the labour market, career planning, education and training.

Officials from the Department of Education, and minister Doug Graham, were unavailable for comment before the Star’s press deadline this afternoon.