MIT Solve

Step 2

Our Solution

JobSensei

Our solution's stage of development:

Pre-Seed

Our solution:

JobSensei is a mobile game that educates, engages and empowers youth to master the job market. Through its three phases, the game will equip youth for a “four S” journey: Skill, Search, Signal and Screen. Games are the universal language of youth; JobSensei uses this language to talk about youth employment.

Our pitch:

Today, there are more young people who are educated, more proficient with technology, and more adaptable than any other generation, yet they face greater difficulties in finding a job.The ILO and World Bank estimate that youth are 3 times more likely to be unemployed than adults.

Even those young people who have pursued a course of study with a specific career in mind often find themselves with skills that are neither relevant nor employable. And, the job search and application process requires a set of skills that aren’t traditionally taught.

JobSensei is a mobile game that educates, engages and empowers youth to look for job opportunities in a compelling way. The game is designed across three phases, each of which tackles a specific challenge that youth face while looking for and securing jobs.

Phase 1 – Skill: This phase will help youth gain the essential skills for job hunting and addresses the “knowing how to job-hunt” challenge. In this phase the player will play mini games that will build her skills for job hunting; such as where to look for jobs, how to build a CV or how to ace an interview.

Phase 2 – Search: Phase 2 challenges the player to play a matching game. Youth will see a map of her city, where they match anonymous youth profiles to job postings, both dummy and real.

Phase 3 – Signal and Screen: The last phase will have actual local vacancies and gamifies the ‘real’ application process. Youth can play some job-specific mini tests, that combined with their player profile, can signal skills to employers and help them pre-screen.

Youth unemployment is a universal phenomenon, but so it the popularity of digital games.

The problem:

Today’s youth are talented, ambitious, tech-savvy, and may be more educated and adaptable than any other generation, yet far too many remain unemployed. Even with the right education and training, youth often are not able to navigate into a job. They may not necessarily know how to search for jobs or signal their skills, or may not understand the labor market or how they stack-up. Further, many platforms or services meant to assist job-seekers or match them with employers only cater to high-skill or big corporate jobs, which may not be the best fit for entry-level or lower-skilled young applicants.

Why our solution will solve the problem:

Finding and securing a job are skills themselves, which young people do not have the chance to gain. Many youth education-to-employment initiatives are not addressing this last mile problem, or are not well-designed to engage and serve youth at scale. Games have the power of the three “i”s, being interactive, iterative they are able to inspire and reach youth in a way other solutions don’t. Globally, there are 2 billion digital game players, half of whom are under 35 and more than 40% of whom are females. JobSensei will harness the power of games to harness the promise in youth.

Who recommended you to Solve - or - how did you find Solve?

I received an email to apply to Solve

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Our organization:

Non-Profit

Where we are located:

United States

How we will sustain our team financially:

We foresee three key channels for sustaining the growth of JobSensei.

We hope to gather mobilization funds and philanthropic capital for upfront development of JobSensei through competitive grants, innovation competitions and collaborations with governments, development agencies working in the space of youth employment. Crowdraising is also a possibility.
Through JobSensei we see long-term opportunities for collaboration with the private sector (including employers and employment services companies such as LinkedIn). Since the game can be used to lower the transaction cost of hiring for employers and provide them with a better skilled pool of applicants, we plan to charge a small fee to employers for advertising vacancies through JobSensei.
In-app purchases and advertisements: Lastly we will leverage the game interface to gather funds for scaling up JobSensei.

The factors limiting our success:

We foresee some risks around our ability to develop and roll-out Phases 2 and 3 at a pace to sustain and grow the player base of Phase 1. The succession from one phase 1 to phase 2 and 3 will require timely deployment of resources to ensure that these subscription-dependent phases are successful.

How long we have been working on our solution:

Less than 1 year

How long it will take to develop a pilot:

3-6 months

How long it will take to scale beyond our pilot:

6-12 months

Our expected annual budget:

120000

How much of our budget we've secured to date:

30000

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