Jobwell
Jobwell Builds Tool for the Job Search Process
Jobwell helps job seekers get organized with simple, intuitive pipelines to manage all job applications and networking activities, along with easy-to-follow job-hunting best practices. It offers data-driven guidance to boost the job seeker’s chances of landing an offer, and continuously learns about the job seeker’s preferences and company hiring patterns to bring forth even smarter tactics. I sat down with the co-founders of Jobwell, Berkeley graduate student Daniel Kent and Wharton MBA graduate May Lu, to better understand what they are doing to tackle this problem.
The Job Hunting Journey
In today’s ever specialized world, it takes more than a degree to find one’s dream job. While every field is different, the job search usually involves most of the following steps:
Searching for possible position – Through job boards and search engines, job seekers identify potential positions and learn about necessary qualifications as well as compensation.
Narrowing down targets – Many people will conduct information interviews with those that are more familiar with the field/company – most likely through networking.
Interview preparation – The effort varies significantly depending on the relevance of prior experience and the type of position. Case interviews at consulting firms and coding Interview at big tech companies, for instance, may require several months of focused preparations, especially for new entrants to the field.
Interview process – It’s common to interview for multiple companies at the same time. Each interview likely contains multiple rounds as well.
Negotiating offers – Once offers are extended, candidates can (and should) negotiate with recruiters. This likely will run concurrently with ongoing interviews for other firms.
For new graduates and career switchers into a new field, none of these steps are trivial. Yet these job seekers often don’t have sufficient experience to know how they should navigate each step in this process. That is where Jobwell wants to help.
Having gone through the job hunting journey themselves, Jobwell co-founders May Lu and Daniel Kent observed that many of their colleagues and friends experience consistent pain point during their job search processes. Namely, these job seekers often struggle to keep track of progress with multiple streams (target companies) simultaneously. This realization motivated the founders to develop the Jobwell platform.
Jobwell Product at Launch
Jobwell is a visual job search platform that also provides users with job-hunting and career development advice. Leveraging the founders’ enterprise software experience, Jobwell takes a pipeline management approach to job searching. The platform provides the following functionalities:
Searching – Through integration with Google for Jobs, users can search for open positions and import job posting details directly into Jobwell – Along with standard qualification and descriptions, users can also find salary range and employee reviews for each position as provided by Glassdoor
Networking – The Networking page breaks down the process into multiple stages (identify, reach out, set meeting, etc.) and allows user to keep track of progress for all networking leads – The platform aggregates tasks and sends reminders to users, along with networking tips such as outreach email templates, informational interview structures, and more
Interviewing – Through similar index card like UI, users can easily manage their interview schedules across companies – Jobwell also provides resume/interview best practices to help user improve their chances of receiving job offers
Jobwell’s Next Steps
Jobwell launched its free CRM platform April this year. With word-of-mouth and social media marketing, the team has brought on over 700 users. On April 29, May and Kent pitched their idea at UC Berkeley’s annual startup accelerator LAUNCH Demo Day. The problem statement resonated well with the audience and Jobwell won second place (chosen by judges) as well as working space at Bee Partners (selected by the audience).
Jobwell at UC Berkeley LAUNCH Demo Day
One promising opportunity in the near term is potential partnerships with universities. After learning about the product, over two dozen university career services offices have expressed interest in encouraging their students to adopt Jobwell for their career searches. Over the summer the founders plan to work closely with select schools to further refine and pilot the product, then hopefully expand to more schools during the fall recruiting season.
Meanwhile, Jobwell is raising a pre-seed round so that it can continue to demonstrate product-market fit and scale. To date, the team has bootstrapped development of its product and its marketing spend.
It is important to note that Jobwell is aware that that it is neither the first nor the only job search platform available to job seekers. LinkedIn, for instance, offers a robust platform for job recruiting. Other platforms, such as Glassdoor, attract job seekers by aggregating valuable user generated data (rating, compensation and job reviews). Jobwell hopes to differentiate itself by designing its solution entirely around the job seekers. It believes that today’s solutions are catered to recruiters, since they generate revenue through subscriptions from these employers.
In the long run, Jobwell wants to not only help its users find a new job, but also to continue to support their career development and future job searches. Based on the company’s analysis of job transition data, Jobwell can then offer personalized career advice to its users even after they land the initial job. The plan is to build on the initial job search through Jobwell’s free CRM platform, and bring users further value such that they can justify a subscription/freemium model and retain users over time. In that sense, Jobwell wants to establish a long-term relationship with each user over his/her career, rather than simply monetizing transient users during their job hunting processes.