At Gofore we are currently building the next generation of services for the Finnish labor market. Together with the Työmarkkinatori (Job Market), our goal is to improve the relationship between work and workers.
A rainy, dark December evening, while walking home after a long day, I smiled. I was thinking about the events of the day. We had just been through six sessions where customers were testing our latest UI and demo. All in all their reactions and feedback had been positive, one of them had described the solution to be “Impressing” but the one that stuck with me described it as “something that could be even therapeutic to someone who has been looking for a job for a long time.” She was talking about and algorithm, a good algorithm.
Describing your skills is not always easy
When looking for a new job it’s not always easy to describe what you know, what your abilities and skills are – things that makes you valuable and a good worker, a good employee.
- It’s hard if you are just fresh out of school with little or no experience for the field you are applying.
- It’s hard if you’ve been securely tucked away from the job market and working for the same employer for the last 20 years and maybe have not kept your CV up-to-date and suspect that your skills might be outdated and now you want a change and a new career.
- It’s especially hard if you’ve been out of work for a long period of time, have applied to maybe hundreds of jobs and have been rejected again and again. How to describe your abilities, skills, what makes you a worthy asset to the companies and employers out there at that point?
AI solution designed to do good
At Gofore we are currently building the next generation of services for the Finnish job market. The situations described above are just some that customers who arrive to the service might be experiencing. Työmarkkinatori / Jobmarket aims to improve the way people and work find each other, we want to improve that match. It’s a service for all citizens to use, whether in school, at work, unemployed, or on leave, it’s serving everyone. And the starting point is a person’s situation, we talk about situation-aware services.
To help our customers describe their skills and know-how better our AI team together with our UX and service designers and development team has been hard at work. The key to finding a new job is to give the Jobmarket some relevant information about you and start building a personal profile. Even a small amount of information can be used to search for keywords that describe your skills. You can then add these keywords to your profile. The keywords will make your profile stronger: they help you to describe yourself better, more in-depth and more accurately. The better you have described yourself, your work experience, and skills the better the results when the service then matches your profile to the jobs that are available.
So, there, you should also smile as not all algorithms are designed to trick or fool you. This one is a good, therapeutic algorithm, an AI solution designed to do good. And it will be available in Työmarkkinatori service now.
Minna Vänskä
Senior Service Designer
