More evidence of the use of the crowd and the cloud in the employment field: A small group of California and Nevada job seekers is turning to an online “crowdsourcing” site to raise money for their candidate community.
A fellow named Paul Platner started this. He has been unemployed — or close to it, underemployed — for four years, after 40 years in construction. Platner is using the site IndieGoGo to raise money for his careers networking group; contributions pay for everything from office expenses (telephone, Internet, coffee) to software for job seekers. If you’re in his local area, you can use the IndieGoGo group to buy a service from one of the job seekers: yard work, graphic design, house work, drama lessons for kids, computer classes for seniors, cooking help, and more.
The local group, he says, is “similar to an employment agency in some ways, but more about creating and providing a community and network of job seekers helping job seekers.”
Crowdsourcing, and specifically crowdfunding, is being used to do everything to get disadvantaged teenagers out of poverty and into jobs, and to bid on freelance work in the U.S. to avoid it going overseas.