Turning the ‘Great Resignation’ into good business
It’s an interesting time to talk to someone in the business of helping people get new jobs — we’re still fully in the middle of the pandemic-driven Great Resignation, and a record 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November 2021 , and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. But that’s exactly what Career Karma and CEO Ruben Harris are doing.
Career Karma helps job-seekers identify potential new career paths, then matches them with coding boot camps and other training programs to help them on their way. Ruben and his team just raised $40 million in Series B funding for a total of $52 million, and it’s launching a live audio feature for job seekers to connect and talk about their career paths.
So, of course, I wanted to talk to Ruben about what they plan to do with that infusion of cash and how exactly they plan to grow — and to talk about how Career Karma makes money, what he’s learned from his community about the future of the job market, and if he thinks the traditional 9 to 5 might be on the way out.
Now, if you’ve been listening to Decoder, you know I love a startup CEO with ambition, and Ruben is definitely an ambitious startup CEO. This was a good one — I think you’ll like it.
Okay, Ruben Harris, CEO of Career Karma. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ruben Harris, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Career Karma. Welcome to Decoder .
Yes, sir. Thank you, brother.
You have some news to talk about. You just raised $40 million in Series B funding. That’s a total of $52 million. I want to talk about what you plan to do with the money, but let’s start at the very beginning. What is Career Karma? What do you do for people?
Career Karma is the easiest way to find a job training program online. We serve blue-collar workers — usually ages 25 to 35 years old — who want to get a job in tech. They can be younger or older, but that tends to be the age range. Job training programs pay us to send them qualified applicants. A common misconception is that Career Karma only helps people get jobs as software engineers, but we actually offer seven different career paths that are technical and non-technical, like sales, marketing, and design. Once we match someone to our best recommendations of a school, they enroll into a training program that gets them a job in about three to 12 months. We have live audio rooms to give students support from peers, coaches, and mentors during the program so that they can get any questions answered or overcome any insecurities. Then, when they get to the job search, they can connect directly with companies to find a job.
That live audio program has been a pandemic hit, right? Are these Clubhouse and Twitter spaces? Did you build that because the networking component was harder in the pandemic?
Before we started Career Karma, we had a podcast like this one; it was called Breaking Into Startups . We still have it. I used to work in radio: we’ve always been bullish on audio because most people that come from this demographic actually listen to the radio and television. We’ve always known that at some point cars are going to be digitized and Bluetooth technology is going to be a big deal. It’s not just Tesla that’s out there, but everything’s digital. Then you have these at-home devices like Amazon and Alexa and things like that. Our roots are in audio, but to your point, as we started to see how audio starts taking off on the internet — it wasn’t just Clubhouse and Twitter spaces. LinkedIn has audio now. Reddit has audio.
To be fair, LinkedIn has everything.
LinkedIn has everything. Exactly. To your point, rather than going crazy with all the features before we had audio rooms, we were actually pretty dependent on Zoom and Discord and Slack to run our community features and spreadsheets. That only gets you so far: if you want to have a billion people, you probably need proprietary technology, so we launched on iOS, Android, and the web last year. Now our rooms are stable and established.
That’s cool. How many people work at Career Karma?
We have about 40 people in the US and 200 people total globally.
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source The business of finding a better job, with Career Karma CEO Ruben Harris
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