SYDNEY START-UP EQUIPS YOU TO GET HIRED
Image: Ulrich Schild, also known as The Job Search Coach.
Job hunting is tough for everyone, and recent reports show that certain age groups are unfairly stuck in the unemployment queue for longer. With ATS (Applicant Tracking Software) commonly used to pre-screen application documents, it has never been more important to know what employers are really looking for in the Digital Age.
For mature aged job hunters, the Liberal government’s Restart scheme has been branded a dismal failure, with the Department of Employment revealing early in November that the programme missed it self-set target by 95 percent. Both major parties have struggled to encourage employers to take on mature aged workers for some time.
For young people in Sydney in particular, their age is twice as likely to be perceived as a significant barrier to finding work than any other city in the world, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Accelerated Pathways project.
The Foundation for Young Australians also reported last month that average Australians will have to brace for a hefty five year wait between full-time study and full-time work.
For Sydney based start-up founder Ulrich Schild, this widespread problem for people seeking jobs in professional (or ‘white collar’) sectors doesn’t sit right.
“We are a very lucky country; we often have more jobs than job hunters. On average we have approximately 800,000 jobs available every quarter and approximately 35% of those are white collar,” said Schild. “The issue we have is educating people in what they need to do in order to get jobs.”
With a passion for people and a professional background in hiring, Ulrich was inspired to create TheJobSearchCoach.net an online & mobile coaching service to help people get job interviews to secure jobs.
Since launching in early 2014 his online service has helped over 1800 people find work, many of them within one to two months, and many of them mature aged workers. When a self-funded start-up has more success at helping this group find employment than a $15 million specialty government program (Restart), we must ask why.
“There’s nothing wrong with the [Restart] program itself and with the intention behind it, it’s to do with the approach and the management of the program,” explained Ulrich. “For it to be successful the focus has to be on making job hunters software-online literate. That’s the main reason why people don’t find work, they’re not aware of all the things that are happening in the online world. If you’re not aware of that, you fail, and the two groups who are most affected by that are the mature age job hunters and the millennials.”
Ulrich discovered what really happens behind the scenes of online job listings from five years of working for the biggest ATS (Automatic Tracking Software) users globally, Seek and LinkedIn.
“The fate of your application is decided by ATS, which are driven by algorithms and key words, and that’s horrible,” said Ulrich. “Our parents told us to go to school, learn something, become someone, work hard, and go to uni…all these things are irrelevant if your future is decided by software. And that has to change, there is nothing wrong with the use of software, but there is a human element in hiring. In the end the success is not from software, it’s from people.”
The Job Search Coach helps people get their applications to the top of the pile by coaching them to understand the systems in place and how to overcome them.
Ulrich will be speaking at major job hunter event #GetHired2016 this month, along with an expert panel of industry professionals who wish to help job hunters beat the system.
#GetHired2016. Dec 14, 6pm-8:30pm. Wesley Conference Centre, 220 Pitt Street. Free for the first 200 people, all other tickets $10. Tickets & info: thejobsearchcoach.net/gethired2016 or search ‘gethired2016 Sydney’ at eventbrite.com.au
