Rutgers alumni develop startup to ease recent graduates into entering job market
Graduating seniors still hunting for a job, pay attention. A new startup called JobHero hopes to help make your job search easier.
JobHero, founded by Sefan Mancevski, along with fellow University alumnus Jerry Reptak and New Jersey native Sherveen Mashayekhi, started off with humble origins — the original plan was to be a “Tinder for jobs," but that changed, said Mancevski.
“It wasn’t deep enough," Mancevski said. "Tinder for jobs is too shallow of an idea to really help job seekers."
JobHero in its current form is a much more powerful system than the "Tinder for jobs" it originally set out to be, Mancevski said. Now it more closely resembles a dashboard, complete with options to save and track job applications, upload and share documents and search job boards.
Mancevski wants JobHero to act as an assistant for prospective job hunters, helping to remind them to do simple but easy-to-forget tasks like send a thank you letter to recruiter. He said an organized job seeker optimizes the way people look for their next job.
“We believe the organizational aspect of finding a job is knowing how to use the best job practices that everyone talks about," Mancevski said. "If you don’t use a spreadsheet or a system like JobHero, you might forget a lot of what you have to do. Hiring managers, especially for startups, need ‘thank you’ letters or something to remind them about you."
Talented candidates can slip through the cracks, if they forget to do these small things, he said.
JobHero’s design was inspired by Trello, a popular task-management system that uses a series of boards to track items, Mancevski said.
One of the earliest incarnations of JobHero was actually a Trello board with about 100 job hunters. Mancevski said.
Mancevski said he and his fellow founders acted as job hunt assistants for these job hunters, much like how JobHero functions today, all the while trying to determine what part of the job search needed the most fixing.
The founders were mainly inspired to create JobHero after all having worked in hiring at past jobs, Mancevski said.
Mancevski said his co-founder, Reptak, was formerly a software engineer at Yahoo. According to Mancevski, Yahoo regularly assigns software engineers to work in recruiting for extended periods of time.
It might seem counterproductive to pull an engineer — whose time is usually very valuable — to work in hiring.
However, Mancevski pointed out that it’s often the case that recruiters aren’t the most technical people. Bringing an engineer into a job interview adds an entirely new level of knowledge and experience to the conversation, he said.
The JobHero team is taking advantage of anecdotes like this with a company blog that gives job hunters advice, stories and general thoughts on finding a job.
“We want to become a content hub where a few people consistently make professional and career related content. There are a few niche blogs out there that do this, but there’s no one central place to find all that content,” Mancevski said.
Mancevski said this kind of content marketing will help JobHero reach the right user-base of college seniors and recent college graduates.
“Since the college force has been our biggest market, we’ve been focused in two places: internships, in how similar applying for an internship can be to finding a job, and college seniors who are ready to graduate now, getting them to apply early so they don’t feel lost when they get out there,” Mancevski said.
Mancevski said his team has been primarily focused on creating an experience that’s usable and easy to understand while still retaining the complex features that help job hunters maximize their time.
JobHero is still growing, but Mancevski said it remains a work in progress and that the JobHero team has big aspirations.
“We want job searches to start and end on JobHero,” Mancevski said.
Students interested in using JobHero can find more information on www.gojobhero.com.
Tyler Gold is a senior majoring in Information Technology and Informatics. Follow him on Twitter @tylergold for tech updates.
