Making / Learning / Work was an adult learning innovation project hosted at the MIT Media Lab from September 2014 to May 2016. This site is an archive of the project documentation.
Capitalize on your loose network of connections for jobs at all skill levels
The Job Graph is an application that allows low-income job seekers to utilize their friend and local community networks to get a job. While LinkedIn does this for high-income job seekers, only 12% of people who have achieved a high school diploma or less use LinkedIn. However, 71% of this user group use Facebook [2] . While Facebook is not a targeted job-search tool, it does contain employment information that many users add to their profiles. Furthermore, there are a number of other resources such as Craigslist, newspapers and usa.gov that advertise jobs, albeit in an often not intuitive manner.
Users would log in via Facebook and have the option of either building a profile or searching for jobs directly. Users have access to a map of nearby jobs, pulled from scraping the aforementioned resources that they can sort by relevant characteristics (industry, salary, skills, etc). As users login via Facebook, a resumé can be automatically compiled through their Facebook profile and users can find out if anybody in their Facebook network works at one of the businesses they are considering applying to. Information is presented visually, with the ability to translate and listen, so as to cater to the widest possible population.
The Job Graph could target any number of subgroups, such as community college students, who could share their information in exchange for information about where their extended network of peers have worked. While we can’t get much useful data about your friend’s jobs from Facebook without a critical mass of users, by using Facebook login we can back into available data in order to construct a more robust picture of local job markets.
[2] Demographics of Key Social Networking Platforms, PEW Research Internet Project
[Image Credit] VizWorld.com
08/13/14 Update
It was suggested that “The Job Graph” be renamed “The Job Connection”.
Q. Along with helping users identify job opportunities, what can we do to facilitate the job application process?
This could be an opportunity to build “coaching” into the software. For example, users could choose to go through a lesson about how to reach out to employers.
08/26/14 Update
- What about also including prompts for job fairs and networking opportunities in the software?
- Providing coaching should be an important part of the software