NYC's employment rate is hovering around 8% but every day thousands of jobs go unfilled. To equip clients for success, nonprofits need to tap into real-time data about where the jobs are and what local employers are looking for.
Our Challenge to You
New York City has dozens of nonprofit workforce development agencies that help low-income New Yorkers prepare for and find jobs, free of charge. When staff at these organizations (often called “job developers”), strategize about the best job opportunities for their clients, they have myriad tools to turn to: Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, Craig’s List, individual employers, and more. It can be overwhelming.
A number of companies have developed tools to scrape and spider the web to aggregate information, in real time, about job openings, searchable at a very specific level. It’s a great step forward, but doesn’t go far enough. Most of these tools haven’t been structured or implemented in a way that makes them useful for on-the-ground staff working with job-seekers, day in and day out. Common constraints include cost, usability, computer literacy, and buy-in by job developers. A product that addresses these constraints or helps existing vendor solutions address these constraints will help job developers better access real-time labor market data and therefore help them provide better matched job offers to their clients.
We propose working with a BigApps team to develop a tool that will be used by job developers, program staff, and ultimately job-seekers. It will be initially rolled out with on-the-ground nonprofit staff who provide free job search assistance for low-income New Yorkers, providing improved access to real-time and aggregated labor market information that allows filtering by location, candidate criteria, and demand forecasting/trend data.
Ultimately, this tool will help job developers identify potential matches for their clients more effectively and source job opportunities more quickly and easily.
Product Wish List
Provide a list of features you would like for the product to include; this list may include a list of minimal functionality (features without which an applicant will not win your BigIdea challenge), and a list of more aspirational features.
• Ability to tap into macro-level real-time data at a zip code level
• Search job offers and filter by following requirements
o Zip code
o Sector
o Industry
o Education requirements
o Date
o Job offers
o Positions
o Salaries
o Full-time or part-time
o Employer
o Tags
o Customizable fields
• Trend data searchable by the list of above requirements
Prizes
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Promotion to the Center4 community.
Possible long-term pilot with workforce service provider or co-development of future product versions and strategic partnerships
Evaluation Criteria
30% Functionality: Meeting needs of service provider in accessing real-time labor market data.
30% Design: User-centered and human-centered interface that elegantly addresses low digital literacy. Ease of use and easy to read dashboard to quickly view, understand and filter data
20% Impact and Scale: Robust design and architecture that would permit scale and ability to service the nonprofit market
20% Business Model: Built on open source, with compliance to security and privacy requirements or self-sustaining model so that end-user can access service for free, pricing structure for nonprofits
Conditions:
Product should be available for use by end of BigApps build events.
BigIdea Mentors
Winning Team
Update 08/05/2014 - We are pleased to share with you that Center4's BigIdea winner is NYC Hired! At the BigApps Block Party a couple of weeks ago, we had several teams pitch solutions for our BigIdea and ultimately chose NYC Hired because it addressed the problems of access for nonprofit employment agencies and for low-skill, low-income jobseekers.
NYC Hired built a search-based tool that aggregates real-time job openings across occupations with low-barriers of entry for low-skilled workers. The application helps users easily and quickly find active job openings targeted at the low-skills job market while helping low-income jobseekers identify better career prospects and pathways. The low-skilled, low-income market is an underserved one - workforce development technologies like NYC Hired that get to the heart of the access issue can potentially tap into a huge market of local and national employment agencies that need real-time job data tools designed for their front-line users. We're also thrilled to announce that NYC Hired was also selected out of 100+ competitors as one of the twenty finalists to compete in the final stage of 2014 NYC BigApps for the Grand Prize Money. Read our interview with David to learn more about NYC Hired and what could happen next.
