A finalist in the learn and work categories, NYC Hired uses data visualizations to display growth, availability, and salary potential in various fields using the City’s labor statistics.
Founder David McCreery is no stranger to competition – or data. He’s got street cred:
– Finalist: Reinvent 311, where he was chosen to present project to CEO of Stack Exchange.
– BetaNYC, where he was nvited to show what could be done with the 311 inquiry API.
– Featured presenter, NYC Mobile Meetup, where he demonstrated open source mapping using NYC open data.
– Featured presenter, Columbia Venture Community, where he demonstrated a data-driven customer-facing website allowing house hunters to search over 100,000 buildings for 3,000,000 complaints including heat, noise and bugs.
But wait! There’s more…
Tell us about the service.
We use novel search options, information graphics and a ton of data analysis to create a new job search website that is more visual, more informative and easier to use than incumbent job sites. The site allows jobseekers to promptly identify the best jobs to apply for out of the tens of thousands that are available.
In addition to seeing live job openings, users can browse different job areas and see how they match up in terms of growth, salaries and entry requirements. The design and features are targeted towards jobseekers at the lower end of experience and skills spectrum: from recent college graduates and career switchers to those with less than a high school education.
Planned features will let users understand the hiring patterns of employers, including seasonality, turnover and time-to-hire. We will later implement Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify the most sought after skills and best phrasing to use in successful applications.
How is it different?
It’s the user experience that sets us apart. When jobs are advertised for a short period of time, it’s crucial that the job seeker identify attractive openings as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Throughout BigApps, career counselors repeatedly told us that popular jobs sites, like CareerBuilder and Monster, often frustrate many jobseekers and even the professionals assisting them. We added a number of search options that are crucial to lower-income and lower-skilled jobseekers, like the ability to filter jobs that require a driver’s license.
We also plan to make available a large amount of helpful jobs data that other sites might have but don’t share with the end users.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
In the NYC area alone, there are numerous government, university and non-profit organizations who presently pay enormous sums for hosted job listings and access to real time labor market data.
What is the business model?
An annual enterprise license. Institutions wishing to use the app would pay an annual license to provide access to their users.
Tell us about your experience with NYC Big Apps thus far.Time moves quickly, especially for teams like ours who had to balance full-time jobs while building something from scratch. Two months didn’t give us much time to identify data sources, APIs and frameworks and combine them into a working app. We met many incredible people throughout the competition whose feedback helped us refine our website while the clock ticked. This is the first year where teams could present their projects in person, and the format gave us the opportunity to connect with the judges. We had two minutes to pitch and 45 minutes for hands-on demos.
In which category is your app and why is your app the best in that category?
Work. Out of the finalists, our app has the greatest potential for immediate impact: helping people find promising jobs quickly and easily. We are entering a website that has been tested heavily by local labor market experts and career specialists. It is positioned to solve a glaring unmet need for user-friendly tools for job seekers. Other apps in the Work category offer users generalized career advice or minor efficiency improvements in their current jobs.
Why is New York the place to launch your particular app?
New York City has hundreds of non-profit organizations assisting jobseekers and these organizations have a demonstrated need for a jobs site like ours. With a large and diverse labor market, the city poses many unique job search challenges that we are attempting to solve.
Additionally, New York has some of the best open data legislation in the country—where thousands of datasets are freely available for use and others can be obtained through a Freedom of Information Law process. This allowed us to incorporate high quality labor data from the State of New York.
What would winning NYC Big Apps mean for your company?
Winning the city’s premier innovation competition would definitely raise our profile. It would greatly bolster our credibility with our target government, educational and non-profit customers. Even if we don’t win, our partners are dedicated to working with us to develop our product.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be and why?
Instead of investment, we are most focused on seeking traction with our institutional customers.
Yankees or Mets?
Cubs. My family is from the Chicago area.
