What is the name of your organization?
Generation: You Employed
What is the name of your solution?
AI-Enabled Job-Matching
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Facilitating economic opportunities for Generation’s tech graduates by using AI to match their skills and preferences with relevant job postings.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Washington, DC, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Unemployment and underemployment are pervasive global challenges, affecting 15% of the global workforce. Generation’s learners are at the forefront of this crisis, with 90% unemployed and 69% unable to meet basic needs before joining our programs. We equip learners to shift the employment dynamic, with 133,000 people graduating from our programs in the last decade, 83% placed within six months of graduation, and 58% earning above a living wage (typically 40% above minimum wage) after 2-5 years.
Securing a Tech role can be a greater challenge for those facing barriers to employment. While 79% of our Tech graduates secure promotions within 2-5 years, breaking into the labor market remains difficult. Tech job vacancies have shrunk due to economic uncertainty and AI trends; entry-level Tech jobs in the US and Europe have fallen ~30% since late 2022, with India and Brazil seeing similar ~25% declines since late 2024 (TalentNeuron). Barriers to entry are rising, with 61% of Tech employers globally increasing their education or work experience requirements (www.generation.org/tech). However, ~70% of our learners have no more than secondary or vocational education. In this environment, entering the labor market is becoming increasingly difficult for the communities we serve.
What is your solution?
In this challenging labor market, skills-based hiring – hiring on job-specific skills rather than degrees and work experience – can dismantle barriers to employment. We believe that a first step to skills-based hiring is enabling learners to efficiently identify job opportunities that match their skills – AI can catalyze this.
Generation’s AI-Enabled Job-Matching system uses Similarity Models analyzing features of data points to assess their similarity to review thousands of job postings to recommend the best matches for our graduates.
Our model uses a skills framework and learner data to identify graduates’ technical skills, behaviors, and mindsets, as well as their preferences (e.g. location, workplace arrangement). Our system aligns these skills and preferences with keywords in job descriptions on platforms and aggregators such as LinkedIn and Talent Neuron - for example, matching creativity within our skills framework to job descriptions using the phrase ‘out-of-the-box thinker’. It then produces a set of ‘best-fit’ job postings for our graduates.
In doing so, our solution enables our Tech learners to focus on job opportunities that best suit their skills and preferences, giving them the strongest chance of securing employment and transforming their lives.
You can find our Product Demo here: https://vimeo.com/1075432561.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution will serve individuals seeking entry-level tech employment, particularly those from low-income households, with limited education, work experience, or low-wage attainment. Our impact to date demonstrates our ability to serve these underrepresented communities – of our 133,000+ graduates, 90% were unemployed and 36% unable to meet their basic needs before joining our programs, with 70% having a secondary school or vocational background.
We focus on learner groups for whom our solution is valuable, such as women. According to LinkedIn, women apply to 20% fewer jobs than men, and, our research shows they are subject to bias – e.g., women with tech certifications receive the same number of job offers as men without tech certificates, and fewer offers than men with similar certifications (www.generation.org/tech).
We support learners for whom English is not their first language, as our system is available in multiple languages – an uncommon feature among similar platforms. This will benefit groups such as our Latin American software and game development graduates, 52% of whom secure global remote tech roles.
Our target population faces multiple barriers to employment; by recommending jobs that match their skills and preferences, we will support them in securing meaningful careers.
