The job market isn’t perfect; college and university graduates are having trouble finding jobs that match up with the skills they learned in school, and employers are having trouble finding graduates that possess the skills necessary to work for them.
Justin and Jack Litchfield, entrepreneurs from Kitchener, have created an innovative solution for this problem with their new startup, JobJunxion.
JobJunxion is an online service that allows students to connect with potential employers before they graduate. Students can register on the website for free and build a personal profile that features their education, work experience, technical competencies and hobbies. Employers can then contact them and discuss ways in which they can build a future working relationship.
Justin and Jack thought of the idea while they were in university themselves. They noticed that students would come out of university with a degree, but not the three to five years of experience that is so often required for an entry-level position.
“We were thinking — how could we set this up better so that students can get more experiential learning while they’re at school and build relationships with employers so that when they graduate, they’re in a much better position to find an actually relevant job,” Jack said.
“In the real world, if you want to build something that really can invoke change, it’s gotta be bigger than yourself — and that’s what I love about this venture so much … our challenge is so much bigger than ourselves.”
The brothers incorporated JobJunxion in 2016 — and they have been working on it ever since.
Being the only full-time members of the organization, Jack and Justin have to take on many different roles every day, each bringing their own unique strengths to the table.
“Jack does a great job with email outreach, a lot of the communication — the external side,” Justin said.
“For me, I really like the strategy side of things, the relationships, the person-to-person kind of stuff. That stuff really gets me going. It gets me excited.”
Many new features will be added to the platform in the future.
“We have big plans moving forward,” Jack said. “Right off the bat, we want to get into machine learning: making the database intelligent in the sense that it can look at the previous hiring patterns of a company and recommend candidates based on those patterns.”
They also plan to collect labour market forecast data, which high school students can use to get a better understanding of what kind of post-secondary programs they should pursue down the road.
They’ve already achieved a lot on their own, but Jack and Justin acknowledge that they need all the help that they can get. With their new student ambassador program, the brothers are recruiting current university students to help spread the word about JobJunxion and what it offers.
“We’re looking for people who are driven, motivated, passionate about the future and youth talent,” Jack said.
“In the real world, if you want to build something that really can invoke change, it’s gotta be bigger than yourself — and that’s what I love about this venture so much … our challenge is so much bigger than ourselves.”
“So, in order for us to try and accomplish that, we need to include so many more people than just ourselves,” he said.