Is the next HR and Talent Tech Unicorn Named…Josie?
Find out more about the AI-powered career coach disrupting the market.
The Great Resignation… Reshuffle… Renegotiation… The Big Quit. Many names are being bantered about to identify the higher-than-normal ‘quit rate’ of workers around the world as the COVID-19 pandemic eases. While much of the discussion about the Great Resignation centers around employee wages, data tells us that the real causes run much deeper than pay.
According to a new study by MIT Sloan that analyzed huge amounts of data to determine the cause of the Great Resignation, employees that are dissatisfied with company culture, that seek recognition of their efforts and skills, and a desire for personal and professional development unmet by current employers are the individuals seeking new employment post-pandemic. How to address the disrespect and insecurity driving most of the Great Resignation is something Talent Venture Group (TVG) believes can be addressed by an AI-powered solution named Josie.
💡Who or what is Josie?
Josie is an AI-powered career coach with the sole focus of helping people find, pursue, and maintain personal career satisfaction. Josie provides data and insights that power informed, unbiased, data-driven career moves. Users are guided through personalized development action plans with the goal of finding the balance between income, work and freedom optimal for them, but Josie doesn’t stop there.
Tailored suggestions such as adaptive CVs and personalized interview guides created for specific job openings are created for each user by analyzing and comparing vast amounts of industry data. Users complete a series of psychometric self-assessments that provide data that transforms Josie into a career-long personal coach helping users accelerate their development at new, or existing, jobs with guides tailored to their capabilities and personality traits.
🤔 Why Josie?
On top of the reasons for the Great Resignation, today’s employees also link work-related factors as a negative impact on their overall mental health. As many as 65% of the US workforce is actively looking for a new job in 2022 and a stunning 53% would also switch industries if only they had help with reskilling or upskilling. Unfortunately, career coaches are for the fortunate few that have $100–750 to spend per session. That’s why Josie is the answer to today’s career conundrum experienced by so many people.
⚡️Josie’s USP
Josie gives individuals the tools they need to understand themselves, providing actionable insights on how to improve their situation and helping them track their progress over time. Almost all AI-powered HR and Talent Tech tools on the market are built for employers, but not Josie, which allows individuals to analyze themselves, build their own narratives, and pursue the career path they want and that fits.
But it doesn’t stop there. Josie helps people find jobs that match who they are today and, more importantly, who they can and become. By doing so, Josie serves a bigger purpose and helps people discover, track and pursue their own career satisfaction in the long term. Users of Josie are enabled and empowered to find careers they never thought of, which liberates them from traditional linear career paths. Through AI-driven results based on personal answers, Josie empowers people to take control of their careers and improve the overall satisfaction in life, one step at a time.
All this happens through the power of machine learning, which studies over ten million LinkedIn profiles of real people with real career paths and analyzes three to five million job postings every month to gain real-time insights on what skills are in demand on an individual job, industry, or company level. Josie uses psychometric profiling based on almost two million personality tests to confidently predict how long individuals will stay in certain careers, with an error margin of just two months! Incredible!
Most people come to Josie for help to make a positive change in their careers. However, users end up staying because of the great content available. Josie uplifts content from other platforms to offer a comprehensive library of high-quality modules available for the users’ personalized development plans. For example, some of the content available on Josie includes matching relevant jobs from Indeed or suggesting a course on Udemy or Coursera to acquire a hard skill to bridge potential skill gaps. Other content in the check-ins or continuous growth modules is connected to soft skills and helps users stay on top of their career satisfaction and makes them feel empowered.
👨🏽💻Meet Team Josie
As TVG invests in great founders on an equal basis of a great product, you know there is going to be an awesome founder story to share! Meet Team Josie, consisting of Stefan Stetz, CEO, and Tobias Calminder, CPO, along with Stefan van Tulder, CSO, who are successfully introducing Josie to the $6.6 billion US market and growing the user base by a whopping 41% monthly.
Stefan and Tobias met when they were working together at an international media group, and have always talked about launching new ideas or concepts together. Life sort of got in the way and nothing happened for a while, until one day when Stefan was on his way back from parental leave and Tobias had just left a FinTech to explore the start-up world. Both of them had serious questions on their career paths and future steps, which made them realize that more people must be in the same boat. Since no easily-available service was found that would help them scale as individuals, they thought, “We could have something here!”
The pair had talent and enthusiasm recognized by TVG Founder, HR and Talent Tech Guru Lars-Henrik Friis-Molin who, along with Stefan van Tulder, had similar ideas about personal career growth and change due to the pandemic disruption to businesses around the world. Anticipating a massive wave of people hungry for a career change, having been forced to re-evaluate and re-prioritize their needs and preferences as jobs disappeared and remote working became the new normal, they envisioned a related service and experimented with some ideas, and Josie — previously known as CareerAnalytics — was born in tandem with a prototype built by TVG.
🚗 Josie’s journey
After digging deeper into why users found and used CareerAnalytics, it became clear that the brand needed to be warm, inviting, with more coaching centered around self-assessment and improvement of career, work, and job satisfaction. Josie’s target audience is 18–34-year-old Americans, providing a supportive, judgment-free environment that uplifts them. With a clear view of how the brand and the product align, the Josie team is confidently on the right track to creating something big. Now they want more partners on board to realize the ambition of combatting career dissatisfaction!
Like most new endeavors, Josie’s journey hasn’t been a straight line. The team has worked its way by following the science, iterating from hypothesis to rapid prototyping to launching new features thanks to the guidance provided by real users. For example, by improving engagement numbers like the share of users with assessments taken and time spent on-site, the team was able to heavily reduce acquisition costs to under €2 in only a few months.
When working in this phase, it is crucial to move from the idea/problem area into user-testing the product quickly, to get an understanding of whether it works or not. The iterations are the key to success, according to team Josie, citing the fact that its user base has grown from 1,300 to 11,300+ to date.
🚀 Josie of the Future
The Josie team, guided by TVG, strongly believes that being the individual’s advocate in their careers is a powerful, compelling product to sell. Until now, data on career analytics has only been available to employers. Josie is putting the power of AI into the hands of individuals, building a rich library of content and modules for people to find their path to career satisfaction. The Josie vision is clear; a workforce where individuals find the right place at the right time.
By helping people combat their dissatisfaction and find true and lasting work happiness, Josie makes a real difference to people that feel lost or worse, they don’t even know where to start. Josie has the opportunity to become the hub for career data and the trusted advisor for anything career-related, transforming itself and growing into a B2B recruitment platform or even further to become a SaaS talent management solution for employers to develop talent in-house.
📩 Jump on board with Josie!
Investors, this is your chance to get into the HR and Talent Tech global market while it is in mid-disruption with an amazing amount of innovation happening right now. If you want to learn more about Josie, reach out to Stefan Stetz at stefan.stetz@careeranalytics.com or the TVG investment team at investment@talentventuregroup.com.
