Job searching is an incredibly slow and painful process. It takes Americans more than nine weeks on average to find a new job. This is not a new problem, but it has now become more urgent than ever. With Americans suddenly experiencing the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, such inefficiency has critical consequences for millions of job seekers.
The job search process hasn’t changed in 20 years – when job listings first moved online. Most job seekers today still visit a job board and search for openings using a single keyword. Faced with many irrelevant results, they then proceed with trial-and-error searching and filtering, checking other sites, and reading through countless job descriptions. The end result is hours and hours of research before one is even ready to begin applying. It’s time-consuming, onerous, and ultimately isolating and stressful due to the lack of guidance and personalization for each individual job seeker.
Now more than ever, we need new job search solutions that can help millions of people find the right jobs for them, which is why we’re thrilled to announce the public launch of Joblist. The launch of the product today is our first step to reinvent how people job search.
Joblist humanizes the process of finding the right job. We recognize that every person is different, with a unique set of needs and goals, so we’re transforming the job site experience to match that reality.
Joblist improves on generic keyword searches by surfacing job matches that are tailored to each job seeker’s unique set of preferences. Through a few simple questions, we collect preferences and then highlight the best matches across millions of available jobs from around the web. We use advanced technology, including machine learning, to convert messy job listings into structured metadata that power our results.
Job seekers can then save their favorite job matches to their own personal “joblist” to help organize their search. They can also share their list with friends, family, and others in their network so that they can work with them to find promising opportunities.
By enabling collaboration, Joblist is the only job platform to allow family and friends – the people who know you best – to participate in your job search and help identify the best roles for you. We have found this accelerates the search process, leads to better outcomes, and reduces the stress, anxiety, and isolation that is so common for many job seekers.
Joblist was built inside Wilbur Labs, a San Francisco-based startup studio, by a team of employment and technology industry veterans.
We soft-launched last year in select markets. Since then, we have been rapidly iterating on the product based on job seeker feedback and have been overwhelmed by the traction to date. Joblist has already helped millions of job seekers and powered over 500,000 new applications.
Although our team originally planned for a public launch at the end of 2020, we accelerated development to get Joblist in the hands of as many people as possible during the current employment crisis.
Check out our announcement for more details about our launch.
This is just the beginning. In the months ahead, we will continue to focus on our core search and collaboration features. Long-term, we are building a complete set of solutions beyond search and discovery so that Joblist can become the go-to place for all job and career-related needs. We're on a mission to help anyone find the right job for them.
