When I finished school my parents’ first demand was that I start pounding the streets with a backpack full of CVs and go to each and every shop on the highstreet and shopping centers and ask to speak to someone who could maybe have a look and give me a job.
The problem with that is it was how things were done back in their day, but in the twenty-first century, job hunting has become a totally different process.
There are already a number of blogs and articles on what you can do to find a job, but they’re mostly just collections of different apps to job hunt on. As someone who has personally spent perhaps 60% of the last 4 years job hunting, I can say from experience, this kind of thing gets old quick.
We can’t check the wanted ads in the papers – who even reads a physical newspaper nowadays, anyway? We don’t want to trawl through shop after shop after shop only to be told to apply online, and never hear anything back. It’s just not the way the world of job hunting works anymore.
It doesn’t work for prospective employees, and it doesn’t work for employers who simply do not have the time to pour over multiple CVs which, in the end, might not even result in finding the right candidate.
And the result of this? Well, it ends up with either one or both parties dissatisfied with their situation. You don’t want to work in a place you don’t feel right for, and companies don’t want someone working for them who isn’t going to contribute enough to justify their paycheck.
But, there is hope in the form of Relink Labs. A Danish startup who believe that the hiring process is broken, and for the past three years have worked on developing technology to change it.
Founded in 2013 by Ståle Fredlund Husby, Relink uses machine learning to revolutionize the way people are matched with jobs. They realized that the current process – and the process that has managed to persist since jobs even became a thing – is not optimal. There are simply too many limitations with manually selecting potential candidates for available positions and even when this is completed, it can end in disaster.
Relink’s technology allows for millions of documents to be read within seconds and uses algorithms to match the best jobs to the best candidates and vice versa. It looks at millions of different events and its recommendation engine constantly improves as it discovers what makes a perfect match.
In its own words, Relink acts like Netflix but instead of finding you a new show to binge on, it gives you a new profession, suited perfectly to you.
People of my generation have grown up being told to follow our dreams, we were also told that we needed to work hard at school and get a degree otherwise we’ end up working at McDonald’s, Asda, or some other soul destroying establishment.
Well, we worked hard at school, we got our degrees, and now it appears that we can’t even get jobs there. Furthermore, a lot of the time we will spend searching for jobs is wasted as many of the available jobs listed are ones we would never apply to.
But with Relink, all of that can change, and we can find the job of our dreams, without having to scour a seemingly infinite number of website, job adverts, and social media promotions. Maybe machines are taking our jobs, but only so they can find the right ones for us.
