Project
Go Be Me was a jobtech startup for unemployed or underemployed people looking for new opportunities. It assessed their current skills and passions and highlighted new job or training opportunities available to them.
Problem
Not only are 18 million Americans unemployed; millions more are now underemployed, their lost hours translating into lost wages translating into lost consumer spending, while emergency unemployment-insurance payments expire, eviction moratoriums lapse, and Congress remains deadlocked. I know this sounds like a problem caused by the pandemic, but this has been a common problem that has been hiding in plain sight for a long time.
Target Market
Go Be Me targeted unemployment centers and community colleges to offer a software platform to onboard and manage clients job coaching tasks. Our users were the unemployed people looking for work, but a core philosophy was that services should always be free to them.
Solution
The first version of the Go Be Me experience was a psychographic assessment that highlights to job seekers openings based on their skills and interests. Next, the user is shown career opportunities open to them should they be interested in building new skills that are just out of reach. Job reskilling with free and inexpensive resources.
The iteration below in the blue compositions shows how the service evolved from an initial first time user experience to a support community of like-minded job seekers. Our in-person testing revealed that a small like-minded community of people going through the same life transition was extremely valuable. Pairing people with small accountability groups helped positive outcomes and avoid feelings of loneliness and depression during the painful process of seeking jobs while unemployed.
Outcome
We operated a series of workshops using a mix of our beta software and in-person training tools we developed. The job training helped all our customers find or create new jobs for themselves. We created agreements with multiple job training facilities nationally. Partnerships were created with The Myers Briggs Company and Nelnet the largest student loan service provider in America.
The first version of the Go Be Me experience was a psychographic assessment that highlights to job seekers openings based on their skills and interests. Next, the user is shown career opportunities open to them should they be interested in building new skills that are just out of reach. Job reskilling with free and inexpensive resources were surfaced.
The iteration below in the blue compositions shows how the service evolved from an initial first time user experience to a support community of like-minded job seekers. We found that pairing people with small accountability groups helped positive outcomes and avoid feelings of loneliness and depression during the painful process of seeking jobs while unemployed.
The paper prototype of the GoBeMe process is what the team used to lead our first customers. This allowed us to test and train our customer without worrying about building expensive technology. Job seekers would daily choose from a series of cards to accomplish for the day. This process is gamified and points are awarded for accomplishing tasks for the day. The job seekers were grouped into small like-minded communities to support one-another. These self-supporting pods became a hallmark of the service and an insight we discovered the importance of only during testing.
Co-creation work was done by the whole founding team of GoBeMe we had engineers, designers, educational experts, and a psychologist involved in helping refine the design flow.
