How We’ll Change the World (Seriously!)
Posted on May 28th, 2010 in Small Business | No Comments »
Arizona’s unemployment rate is currently a staggering 9.4 percent. That’s pretty high, and so it’s understandable that unemployment is a big story. It’s certainly newsworthy when 300 thousand people (out of a 3 million person labor force) can’t find a job. What’s always struck us as a little odd is the fact that it isn’t newsworthy when that number’s closer to 100 or 150 thousand. If you’ve taken a few econ courses, you know the reason for this: conventional theory tells us that a certain level of unemployment is simply unavoidable.
The “unavoidable” element of unemployment is largely the result of frictional unemployment, which is unemployment that occurs naturally due to job searches. Imagine that you’re a company that just opened up a position. Somewhere out there, there’s the perfect candidate for your job, and she’s looking for work. Eventually, you will (hopefully) find each other, but, in the meantime, she’s experiencing frictional unemployment, and you’re both suffering as a result. Frictional unemployment has been an unavoidable fact of life for as long as modern economies have existed, so it makes sense that we should accept it as an unfortunate way of life. The thing is, we really don’t like the idea of frictional unemployment. The whole concept is frustrating; it’s like one of those tv plots where two characters are perfect for each other and they just haven’t realized it yet. Sorry, frictional unemployment, but it’s been done to death. That’s why we’re so giddy about our matching algorithm, which takes virtually all of the friction out of the process for members of the OrangeSlyce community. The qualified young freelancer doesn’t have to spend days (or weeks, or months) sifting through job postings to find the company’s posting, because she’s automatically matched to the job when the employer posts it. The employer doesn’t have to spend weeks gathering applications and then even more time sifting through those application to find the perfect worker, either: instead, her information is automatically delivered (along with a few other qualified students) straight to the employer as soon as he posts his job opening and uses our matching feature. A process that would otherwise take weeks can be condensed to a matter of hours. There’s a nice side-effect, too. By cutting down the search process for employers, we’ll be making it cheaper for employers to hire people in the first place. This means that businesses will have an incentive to hire more people, which will help take another bite out of unemployment. At OrangeSlyce, we’re in the business of killing frictional unemployment. That’s the value that we can offer every member of our community. “Stop searching” isn’t merely a request we ask of you; it’s the metric by which we’re judging ourselves.
