A new job-search site aims to solve the elusive 'culture fit' problem
CareerLabsCareerLabs.
How you fit within a company is becoming more and more important to today's job seekers.But until recently there was no one-stop shop for filtering job searches through this lens.
It was for that reason CEO and cofounder Anthony van Horne began developing CareerLabs, which launched last week.
"People deserve to know the real scoop on a company before they work there," van Horne tells Business Insider.
His new job-search site allows job seekers to filter positions by things like above average work-life balance, great workplace culture, employee satisfaction, employees that share a candidate's political views, and the financial health of a company.
The idea came about in 2007 during the recession. Van Horne says at the time he and coworkers at Goldman Sachs saw the world of finance imploding around them and were unsure of what the finance industry would look like when the dust settled.
Van Horne says he began looking for other work and was frustrated by his inability to search for jobs based on what he knew he wanted in a company, like small teams and passionate colleagues.
Today, van Horne says young job seekers "want things that weren't on the table for their parents at all: like parental leave, childcare, time off to do charity work, help with student loans, and more."
Van Horne says he's also seen a surprisingly massive interest in remote work and flexible work hours from users so far.
CareerLabsUsers can search for jobs with great work-life balance and compensation.While job sites like Glassdoor and Indeed provide anonymous reviews about the inner workings of companies, van Horne says "the real power of CareerLabs comes when you use a few filters together, because being happy in a job means much more than a single score or review."
CareerLabs goes beyond anecdotal reviews, he says, to create "statistically significant indexes" by combining millions of data points. "By doing so it neutralizes the scores it gives so people with an axe to grind can't skew things."
"When there's a discrepancy between what you've been told and what a company's actually like, then you're wasting everyone's time because you're not going to be happy, and the company is not getting a good hire," van Horne says.
CareerLabs uses machine learning and aggregates data from a wide variety of sources, including Freedom of Information Act requests, exclusive surveys, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Almost 70% of all US companies - that's more than 22 million companies - have profiles on the site already that van Horne says can't be influenced or edited by employers.CareerLabs offers a basic version of the site for free, but if you want to learn which companies sponsor the most work visas or a business's political alignment, you'll have to pay.
So far, he says the site is seeing good traffic and session length from young job seekers "who are unsatisfied with the job-search and career-management tools available today."