labor-market
(5)
The Degree Filter Was the Bug. Opportunity@Work Wants Employers to Rewrite the Code.
America has more than 70 million workers with skills learned outside a bachelor’s program. Opportunity@Work discovered that training them was only half the job - the harder task was persuading hiring systems to see what was already there.
Simba Jonga
Simba Jonga is the founder and CEO of Laborup, an AI-powered hiring platform often described as the LinkedIn of manufacturing. A University of Tennessee chemical engineer turned Stanford AI researcher, he built Laborup after watching skilled machinists, welders and technicians struggle to get hired despite working inside high-tech factories. The platform uses an autonomous AI voice agent to interview and vet workers, building profiles in minutes and matching them to high-paying industrial jobs. Laborup has raised $7.7M from investors including NVP, Torch Capital and angels Jeff Dean, Jeff Jordan and Evan Moore, grown a 25,000-strong East Tennessee worker network, and is expanding across the South and Midwest.
Ben Casselman
Ben Casselman is the Chief Economics Correspondent for The New York Times, where he turns labor reports, Fed decisions and inflation prints into stories people actually read. A self-described 'unapologetic econ nerd,' he built his name on evidence-first, data-driven reporting at The Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight before joining the Times in 2017. He shared a Gerald Loeb Award and a Pulitzer finalist nod for Deepwater Horizon coverage, is a frequent voice on the NYT podcast The Daily, and teaches economics reporting at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Jobcase, Inc.
Jobcase is a Cambridge-based social platform built for the workers most job sites overlook - hourly, frontline and blue-collar Americans. With more than 110 million registered members and roughly 20 million monthly actives, it pairs a community forum and resume tools with machine-learning job matching, earning rankings among the largest U.S. online career destinations. Founded by Fred Goff and Tony Deigh out of the wreckage of an AI hedge fund, Jobcase makes money from employer advertising and recruiting partnerships while keeping the core product free for job seekers.
Conor Sen
Conor Sen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and founder of Peachtree Creek Investments, an Atlanta-based money management firm. He built a national following by reading the economy through housing, demographics and the slow grind of millennials moving through their life stages, and turned a habit of arguing with strangers on Twitter into one of the most-cited macro voices in financial media. His tagline, 'The future is a policy choice,' doubles as his worldview.