Thursday, October 9, 2014

You Know LinkedIn - Meet The Next Wave Of Startups Trying To Hack Your Job Search

Aaron Taube

In the past several years, mobile technology has simplified a wide range of the cumbersome, time-consuming, and unpleasant chores required of the professional class.

There's Homejoy to clean your apartment, Uber and Lyft to hail a cab, and more food delivery apps than you can count.

But for all of the solutions created to improve the lifestyles of affluent urbanites, finding a job - the initial step that makes such a lifestyle possible - remains a lengthy and universally miserable process.

Sure, massive job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder alert us to an unprecedented number of potential openings - but who wants to give up hours of their precious leisure time crafting the perfect cover letter, only to submit the application into the internet equivalent of a black hole?

And while LinkedIn makes countless powerful people available for networking, the site is not perfect, especially for those who don't have the time or the moxie to take advantage of it.

The result is that many would-be job seekers, lots of them talented and capable, choose not to bother until their current jobs become too bleak to bear.

Or at least that is what they have done until now.

In the past year, a new crop of apps has sprung up with the goal of hacking the job search for a new generation of professionals - one that is constantly on the lookout for the next opportunity and never very far from a mobile phone.

"We're trying to liberate passive job seekers," says Yarden Tadmor, founder and CEO of the New York City job-hunting app Switch. "Eventually, what we're trying to create is an environment that connects people with companies and hiring managers."

Switch, which went live this past summer, was inspired by Tadmor's experience hiring for teams at several media technology companies, including the content recommendation engine Taboola.

Read the full article to find out what the hot new apps are.

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