Helping People Get Jobs
aka what I’m doing next
I’m excited to announce that, as of a couple of week ago, I started as a Director of Product at Indeed. Without going into too much detail, my role will be focused on helping job seekers everywhere with their entire journey around getting jobs.
If you’re in the process of job hunting, do take notes on what you’ve found challenging, what tools you wish you had, what you wish could be better, and let me know!
What about the Vague Mountain?
In my time off, I managed to spend some time to figure out the areas I wanted to focus on and laid out my longer term goals in a post about a mountain to head towards. A few things have changed since then.
First, I still believe there’s a paradoxical lack of connection in our connected world and an opportunity to help people find their communities and build meaningful connections. I continue to try and find ways to work on this area but haven’t found a great link into business so in the meantime, my efforts here continue from a personal level, both from the volunteer work I do in communities and our Burning Man camp that focuses on friendships.
Second, while I enjoyed dabbling in the VR space and learning Unity and C#, I believe there’s a long road ahead for mainstream adoption still. If you haven’t tried it, I think you’ll be surprised at how good the technology has become, but the barriers in cost, effort, and attention are still high. I also don’t believe this is a crucial part of my own personal mountain.
Finally, even from last summer, the political climate has dramatically changed. Immediately after the election, I wrote about a few things the tech industry could focus on:
I didn’t list, “helping people get jobs,” as one of those—in part because I feel unemployment and disenfranchisement is better served by improving education and opportunities.
But having a job leads to opportunity. And having a job leads to less of a feeling of being disempowered. Indeed’s mission is, “we help people get jobs,” and I’ve seen evidence that they value this over all other metrics. You can see it in their (in my opinion, under-marketed) site where 10 million people share their stories: http://gotajob.indeed.com/
How we help people get jobs goes well beyond just listing jobs. I’m looking forward to exploring these solutions.
And of course…
We’re hiring. Indeed has offices in dozens of cities with product/technology centers in Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, and Tokyo. Let me know if you’re interested in joining.
