June 14, 2022, Pennsylvania, USA—Job dissatisfaction and unemployment have been rampant and growing even before the pandemic. People are stressed with their job search and reskilling/upskilling needs, especially within specific audiences like first-generation nationals, neurodivergent individuals, and resilient people from neighborhoods with little community assets and accessible supports.
The CO.CAREERS platform is built to enable a low-effort user experience for people of all walks of life through a context-aware search engine that displays good jobs while promoting upskilling through easy-to-understand and consume career content created to promote future-proof jobs to diverse communities.
Founded by Ali Jaffar and backed by purpose-driven digital agency Key Medium, CO.CAREERS and its award-winning team are on a mission to make it easy to connect people and organizations in your community with a private talent network and up-to-date practical career resources.
Their vision is to see a world where everyone can achieve economic opportunity—without asking job seekers to sacrifice their values to achieve work-life balance and get the pay they deserve.
Job seekers looking for better opportunities, new industries, or completely different roles can use CO.CAREERS
Discovering a career that excites with benefits, appreciates values, and prioritizes work-life balance matters, but it can be very stressful.
Changing jobs is one of the most stressful life experiences an individual (and their family) can face. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average tenure is 4.1 years, with some industries, such as hospitality, having the lowest median tenure at 2.3 years. And changing to a different line of work may require completely uprooting their day-to-day and starting to balance job searches and taking interviews while caring for an infant child. Changing jobs ranks on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory as more stressful than taking on a new mortgage or facing foreclosure. As such, job seekers may benefit from a low-effort user experience that subtly encourages options for upskilling or even reskilling for a different line of work for a career that suits their lifestyle.
How the CO.CAREERS Platform Works for Job Seekers
Jobs seekers can use the CO.CAREERS' Good Jobs Search Engine to help them find a career and flexible job that suits their lifestyle by allowing them to search available positions by keywords or job titles such as UX, Designer, Web Design, Marketing, HR, or Sales and more.
Users can also filter by employment type and job post time to find the freshest jobs (e.g., in the past month). Job seekers can sign up for the weekly job notifications based on their search preferences entered to get weekly email notifications and bookmark jobs within the platform.
On the CO.CAREERS platform, they only post careers with specific job functions from employers who meet human-centered criteria since that's what they know best. It demonstrates what the CO.CAREERS platform can look like as a configured private talent network. The search then returns matches from vetted employers looking for top talent.
The current job posting types are configured to revolve around:
- User Experience Design and User Research
- Web Design and Web Development
- Marketing and Communications
- Sales
- Business Development
- Human Resources
It is updated with new jobs every day.
Talent Profile
Job seekers may also sign up for a free account with minimal details and proceed to fill out their Talent Profile. A filled-out talent profile is a great way to identify a job seeker's strengths and weaknesses and their education and experience. They can share it online and download their resume as a PDF.
The Good Jobs Guide
Complimentary to the availability of good jobs, CO.CAREERS offers an exclusive "Good Jobs Guide," which is a Knowledge Base with up-to-date, practical career content that can help job seekers find a career that feels like more than a boring 9-5.
When searching for a job, weighing various factors that will affect their decision is crucial. Some of the most crucial considerations include skillset and experience, the job market in an area, work/life balance, and salary and benefits. It can take weeks, months, or even years to figure out what job seekers want and need in a job. And they may have to switch career paths multiple times in their life. So it's essential to know how to choose a new career. Before making any decisions, we encourage job seekers to take some time to think about the kind of work environment they want to be in, the type of work they enjoy, who they want to work with, and more.
These free career guides and resources can help with a job search. As part of CO.CAREERS' ongoing series of the Good Jobs Guide, they are hiring 100 writers who will contribute to this guide. Regular content highlights good careers and offers information that job seekers can use for career success.
Amplifying human-centered employers and their good jobs
Connecting career seekers and human-centered employers in their community around specific job functions, industry, and geography are made possible through the platform.
CO.CAREERS has a self-service FAQs section with more information. Live demonstrations are available by request, and access to the platform for Employers goes through a short review process for early adopters and is entirely free.
How the CO.CAREERS Platform Works for Employers and Recruiters
Simply use a work email address (e.g., not a personal Gmail), and submit account information on the Employer sign-up screen. They will review the application within 5 days and follow up via email to complete the onboarding process with a no-cost 20-minute, 1:1 walkthrough to help hiring managers get the vacant job posted.
Here’s what to expect to see in the Employer Dashboard. Available jobs are shown along with the posted recruiting analytics associated with open jobs.
Recruiting metrics tracked in the employer dashboard:
- # of Posted Jobs
- # of Total Applicants
- # of Job Views (Visibility)
- Application Rate
Applicants can apply via the platform, and Employers can then review their resume and quickly decline it or send them an email follow-up without leaving the dashboard. This offers a lightweight Applicant Tracking System (ATS) built-in to the software.
Employer accounts can manually post a job in a simple three-step process. Posting a new job in the Employer Dashboard starts with basic information about the Company and the Job Title, Description, and Requirements.
Manually adding job postings to the CO.CAREERS search results pages is easy.
Community sponsors and networks can partner with us on a new early adopter pilot program.
Many communities in the United States and worldwide lack access to up-to-date career resources that offer practical guidance to help their job search.
An opportunity for career centers and communities to innovate
One of the advantages of the historic lack of development of career guidance in our country is that we can learn from prior mistakes and try out new and innovative approaches. A key opportunity for communities is to use digital technologies (e.g., CO.CAREERS) to their full potential.
Today, most (if not all) taxpayer-funded career centers have been using one-size-fits-all technologies that are not human-centered. And this is a shame because the technologies and approaches are barely adequate. They may also lack modern, purpose-built cloud-based technology since they are often locked into a software vendor for years and sometimes decades and have to spend tremendous amounts on legacy software upkeep. This is where CO.CAREERS can provide a partnership opportunity for local, regional, or national workforce development organizations and community sponsors that may be a good fit. After all, the CO.CAREERS platform's development was informed at the outset of the pandemic by more than just 1K job seekers in March 2020. While working to provide rapid responses to the unemployment issue for the Philadelphia, PA region (with the City's workforce system), the award-winning team at Key Medium, which is behind CO.CAREERS, supported the creation of digital resource centers and web content that increased access to career development guidance and referrals to credentialing programs and career services.
The team received direct input from leading State, local, and regional workforce development experts, educators, and leaders of organizations involved in workforce innovation on the possible introduction of a platform like CO.CAREERS and gleaned valuable expert knowledge from their past work on over 12 successful initiatives, some of which include supporting Philadelphia's Hospitality & Entertainment Industry Partnership launch during the pandemic, supporting the largest regional disAbility employment agency's response with virtual resources, supporting a future of work initiative, and leading a pro bono workforce impact analysis of city-wide responses from nearly 1K workers impacted in Philadelphia. Even after completing successful initiatives, which provide value to many job seekers daily, the team noticed that more could be done. Especially around the need for a more robust set of up-to-date career resources to help move the needle on good jobs that earn workers living wages.
How the CO.CAREERS Platform Works for a Community Sponsor
Spin up a private talent network based on their cloud software, and work with their award-winning team to develop content for your custom Knowledge Base.
The Knowledge Base provides up-to-date practical career seeker resources for people in every community and is fully customizable. This enables you to share career readiness resources or simply work with their expert creative team to produce on-brand, helpful career content at lightning speed. Whether career success means a new career path and the associated upskilling required involves industry-recognized credentialing, this information should be easily made available to job seekers in the community. And the award-winning team behind CO.CAREERS offers to help produce short-form content from start to finish, shared via subtle nudges within the platform and social media networks, leveraging human-centered design best practices. Take a look at how easy it is to add content that refers job seekers to micro-credentialing, GED, or other programs online and in their community.
Necessary configurations revolve around specific search terms and, if desired—geography. See how easy it is to configure by choosing a jobs data source, which can be custom-built for automatic integration.
For example, a nonprofit industry partnership looking to connect its member organizations and their staff with the ability to promote vacant jobs they need to fill fast to bolster capacity to meet increasing demand, such as for a 'Program Manager.'
Another example is an industry partnership in Philadelphia that may partner with us to create a private talent network for the hospitality industry, helping to increase awareness and access to job opportunities for much-needed vacancies for positions such as 'Hotel Manager' or 'Event Coordinator.'
White-labeling allows the platform to be configured to meet brand style guides. Work with the CO.CAREERS team to launch a pilot program that matches your branding and belongs in your community.
Automatic integrations with systems you already use. Eliminate manual job posting submissions and save tons of time with integrations that fetch new jobs daily.
Sponsor a pilot program in your community with CO.CAREERS' purpose-built cloud software
Early adopter community partners in different regions in the US are encouraged to reach out to discuss piloting a white-labeled version of their platform. It is offered at a special early adopter licensing fee, depending on the pilot's scope and nature. Contact CO.CAREERS if you want more information on maximizing impact and moving the needle on good jobs in your community with a customized pilot program. Their low-cost licensing fee ensures you incur zero design, software development, or other administration or management costs.
###
Ali Jaffar, CEO
Key Medium LLC d/B/a CO.CAREERS
215.302.0280
press@keymedium.com
100 S. Juniper St, Floor 3, Philadelphia, PA 19107
After years of research and experience supporting a rapid workforce response to the pandemic for the Greater Philadelphia region, I am proud to launch what we've been working on for the past few months (and researching for years)—the CO.CAREERS Good Jobs Search Engine!
If you are open to connecting to take this initiative to your community, don't hesitate to reach out. We are seeking just 2 communities to spin up an early adopter pilot program with our technology.