Joe Fuller: Many of America’s middle- and lower skilled workers face numerous day-to-day challenges finding, getting, and keeping a job. They can lack anything from knowledge of a potential employer’s recruiting process to the self-confidence to pursue a potentially attractive job opportunity. How can they be provided with the information and the insights to overcome barriers like those? What sources can they trust? Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I’m Harvard Business School Professor, and Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. Today I’m speaking with Fred Goff, the founder and CEO of Jobcase, a platform for job searchers and professional networking, primarily for those without college degrees. It’s sometimes called “LinkedIn for the rest of us,” but that doesn’t do it justice. Jobcase has significant insight into the issues facing middle- and lower-skilled workers. We'll discuss those challenges, along with how Fred plans to use the platform's unique position to benefit both workers and the companies seeking to employ them. Welcome to HBS, Fred.

Fred Goff: Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Fuller: Fred, Jobcase has been described by some people as a LinkedIn for people without a college degree. Could you tell us a little bit more about it, because I think that does it some injustice.

Goff: Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, we built Jobcase to be the social media platform to help people navigate the future of work. We are focused on the nonprofessional workers in the country, which is about 80 percent of the workforce. Sixty-seven percent of people over the age of 24 do not have an advanced four-year degree. But it’s absolutely inclusive. Fifteen percent of our members do have college degrees. It’s almost evolving to a 21st-century union, if you will. There’s really two things we think about: How do we empower you individually? And given this massive audience we have now collected—in 100 million-plus members—how do we take the power of that and use the opportunity of it and the responsibility of it to now advocate for workers as a whole?

Fuller: When you say “social media” in this context, how do you think about it?

Goff: It is a place where people air the most current thoughts they have. It’s not a place where you worry about are you typing it right or have the right grammar. You’re surfacing anxieties or successes or concerns or questions. And people come in and help. I think the caveat to our social media site is it’s really a community of people you don’t know helping you. So, if you think about Facebook, it’s really about first- and second-degree connections; LinkedIn, first- and second-degree connections and extending out. We were as much informed by Quora and Reddit as we were those platforms when we built it—because for most people, figuring out how to deal with ageism, how to ask for a promotion, if you’re working in a warehouse and wish you were a nurse and “How do I go on that path?”—the chances that somebody that’s a first-degree connection of yours might have that answer is fairly low. The chance that somebody in the country that’s on Jobcase can help you is extremely high. And so it’s really a community where people are very raw in exposing their thoughts. And then the whole conversation is sparked, not just around this anxiety, but solutions to address that anxiety. That’s the social media platform we have.

Fuller: So let’s talk about what sorts of solutions. You alluded to some—for example, “I’m in this type of position. How do I get from here to what I actually aspire to do?” Can you give us some kind of practical examples of the way information is exchanged and how that advances your members’ futures?

Goff: Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately there’s no shortage of anxiety in this current economy, which, of course, is what confuses so many people—that, when you have on the front page this record low unemployment, and it’s not until the fifth page, these stats of the average household not having enough expenses to cover an unexpected $400 expense and such. I think it would go under buckets of “-isms”: ageism, racism, all sorts of difficulties people address in that manner, I think the speed of change in jobs and what they mean and how to move ahead. A common anxiety that might be surfacing around ageism. You have a lot of this what we call the “black hole problem.” You don’t get further in a job-search process or called into the interview, and you start suspecting why, but it’s not really told to you. That’s a very common concern on our site. And what you’ll see is a lot of other people jump in and help. You’ll see conversations where someone might say, “A lot of times, what they’re concerned about is your energy level. Why don’t you just proactively address that in a conversation?” Or “A lot of times, they think you can’t learn something else. Talk about something that you learned recently.” And so there’s these really constructive things that maybe we didn’t think of. This is not us having the hubris to think we have the answers to these anxieties or problems. This is us surfacing a platform where people will help each other because they have figured out themselves the right answers, the right way to probe, the right way to get around constructs, even when interviewers or hiring managers might not be so giving of the information.

Fuller: So it’s a blend of the social platform, where people can share feelings, sentiments, anxieties, but also practical tips, experience, introductions even to employers.

Goff: Absolutely. We don’t know how to get that job in Walmart. Somebody who’s done this is going to be the one to tell you—that’s what the platform is about. The thing that we get the most feelings of success about, with regard to Jobcase, comes from the empathy, though. There’s a lot of people out there that might not have on their radar screen other options or opportunities. And what we find is, in our landscape, Joe, there’s an awful lot of good work going on around things called “adjacencies”—a lot of work to say, if you’re a cashier, “Let’s look at all those skills. Let’s break it down. What are jobs adjacent to cashier that might be there?” And an example use sometimes is you might not think a medical billing specialist is, but there’s a lot of overlap between those jobs. The big breakthrough for us is the idea that someone else in the community says, “You can do this.” Because I’m guessing we’re sitting here in this beautiful Harvard Business School, and people look very successful and very happy, and I’m guessing to get here, you probably have a whole cohort of people in your life that told you that you can do anything, you can be anything, et cetera. Unfortunately, the majority of people in this country have not necessarily heard that message. And so being in a warehouse or being in some situation and trying to learn something else, if you’re … some of these great stories we hear about West Virginia, where they try to learn how to code, or even somebody who decides to go into health care because that’s a growing field, that’s a big, huge step for someone who might not have anybody in their first-degree connections on how to do it. So hearing from other humans that are very empathetic. That’s the killer sauce. It’s not just surfacing what you can do. It’s a community that supports you in really encouraging you to pursue it.

Fuller: Economists talk about social assets and how important they are to help explain the success of people often from higher income levels with higher educational attainment, that there’s this self-reinforcing loop. For example, you’re four times more likely to get a paid summer internship as a college student if your household income is above $100,000 a year than if it’s below $100,000 a year. It sounds like, in some case, Jobcase is creating a new type of social asset base for your members that helps offset some of those advantages that other people with more traditional social asset bases have benefited from.

Goff: A big part of what we're doing, creating these communities and these support groups…that's what we're trying to be about. Strip away the anxiety of work, the future of work conversations and all this, and then in simplicity, what is Jobcase? It's a platform where people help people.

Fuller: What role do employers play on Jobcase. Do employers actively recruit on Jobcase? Do they post jobs? How does that all work?

Goff: Employers want to access our community because they want to hire people in our community. Employers want to access our community because they want to promote their brand into the community, or quite often, increasingly to speak with their own employees or their own alumni networks, which we actually have very good traction in terms of getting messages out. So we have products like that. It can be as simple as them posting jobs and hiring. Hiring events are extremely popular when you’re talking about lower-wage jobs at very high volume. So if you have an e-commerce company that has a sorting and facilities near all the major airports. We’re the community that can turn that out very quickly for them.

Fuller: So, forgive me for being crass, but who’s paying for all this?

Goff: The companies.

Fuller: The companies.

Goff: Yeah, so they will pay for … in that particular example, they will pay for clicks or applications to jobs. They will pay us to promote a hiring event they might be running, or maybe we’ll even help them with the hiring event.

Fuller: And what are you hearing about from employers in this tight labor market about what their concerns are, how they’re anticipating the evolution of their needs, and what you can do to help them fill those needs?

Goff: Some of our larger strategic employers, which employ hundreds of thousands of people in this country, and when we talk with the CHROs, the conversations oftentimes go to retention. And they go toward broader future-of-work concerns in terms of AI automation and such. They sometimes go to the tight labor market we have now, but not much. They’re kind of looking a little bit past the horizon on this. When we talk with people that have the responsibility of keeping everything staffed today and potentially the next month, in that regard, there’s a lot of eyes on competition in a tight labor market. If you go to places like, say, San Francisco, and we go into peak season in terms of retail and transportation and warehousing and all that. And so you might have a smaller employer in that they really have to pull out all the stops to try to get attention. For us, we try to surface a different perspective. One employer was trying to hire in a difficult community like San Francisco, and had called us up to talk about a huge budget for marketing and recruitment to try to really get the word out and get people in. And we had to have a tough conversation about advocating for our members to say, “Why don’t you take that budget instead of doing this, give them a bonus. Why don’t you increase the pay?” Because this is a competitive market. Why don’t you make the job better? Why don’t you share some of that spend?” And we think that’s the way to play it for the long road. I think that’s less income for my firm in the short term, but if we’re on the side of our members for the long haul, we think that’s what’s going to reward Jobcase.

Fuller: Let’s go back to something that you referred to earlier, which is kind of a next-generation union and the members reflecting the body of the vast majority of American workers. That’s a pretty big and powerful union. But when you use that phrase, what did you have in mind? And how would this group be more effective in advocacy in its own interests?

Goff: When we launched Jobcase in 2015, we believed that capitalism was out of balance. I come from a mindset of being a capitalist. I think capitalism has done wonderful things for the living standards of the whole global population.You have the Business Roundtable, 181 CEOs saying it’s about stakeholder, not shareholder. But there’s no evidence they mean that. None. I think what’s happened is that this mantra of shareholder value that was so incredibly important to right-size businesses in the US in the ’80s and make this country competitive again has gone so far they don’t even remember workers. And we see so many examples of that. We see a year ago, the Toys “R” Us example, where you’re getting private-equity bonuses and nobody coming out. Right now, look at the pension plans for the WeWorkers being let go versus the founder. GM a year ago, with 16,000 people, and what was happening there. There’s no evidence that there’s any bump in the boardroom for this. So when we look at how worker advocacy has fallen off, there’s only about 10 million private-sector union workers today. There’s 160 million people in the workforce, probably should be about 180 million. So, as important as an individual union is, it’s not really capturing the majority of the workers’ voice. And yet, here we sit—Jobcase—with 70 million arrivals a month, 25 million monthly active uniques, 100 million registered members that are all the workers of this country. And what we look at is, in the last century, unions really effected change with that kind of Jimmy Hoffa mentality. They would starve the boardroom of labor unless they gave them what they wanted. They would throw a brick through the window unless they gave him what they wanted. And there was a point that was effective. But in a world of globalization and on-demand markets, that’s not so effective. So when we think about a 21st-century union, we first mean there has to be an online platform where people come together, because how can union workers of Uber drivers that are all in their cars and not even employed on a W-2 get together to be a collective voice? There has to be a platform for that. And then our view is: What is our responsibility for 70 million arrivals? Are we just supposed to do some Facebook/Cambridge Analytica thing and just mine the crap out of that for advertising? Or are we supposed to take the opportunity of that to go advocate for them? And we think we can reward good actors. We think that we can look at a business that is moving their minimum wage above 15 bucks and tell our members not just go work there. No, go buy their products. We think we can start to have an impact on the pension funds managing people’s money, for whom they should be investing in. And so we want to be a partner to these things like the Business Roundtable. And we’re surfacing, and Workers’ Roundtable would be a complement to that. So that when Jamie Dimon says it’s about stakeholder not shareholder, and then you look at the last year—there’s a $40 billion shareholder buyback. You could take 20 percent of that. Twenty percent of that shareholder buyback that he’s talking would still leave $32 billion of their exceptional time lately and profits to go to their shareholders. We’re not saying one versus the other. And that other 20 percent could be a windfall bonus to non-executives at JPMorgan, which would translate to $35,000 bonus for each of those employees. Do you know what that does to communities? Do you know what that does for their tellers? Do you know? This is about holding them to standards. I think we have an opportunity at Jobcase to provide specific policy actions that’ll start to move things back toward to the workers. And I think that we can reward good actors for doing that. We’ve got to broaden how we’re hiring. We’re still hiring for a notion that’s a little bit 20th century as well, and we’re missing a tremendous amount of folks that should be in the labor markets. We should be hiring for skills, and understanding that opportunity goes wide and broad. There’s a notion about diversity helps. I think that has gone in a healthy direction. It used to be, I think decades ago, people wanted to check the box for diversity to say they’ve checked the box. Then there was an understanding that, no, this really helps your company. If you’re serving a nation that’s multicultural, you should have multicultural people figuring that out. And I think that people got religion on why this helps them as well. But that hasn’t translated to hiring practices. I think we still are looking at degrees and school names and four-year packages around skills, and that limits the workforce. That limits a whole bunch of people that can come into the workforce.

Fuller: Certainly our research at Harvard Business School has indicated that there is a systematic and growing bias in favor of applicants who have a college degree, even in jobs that have historically not required a college degree. That trend continues to accelerate, despite the fact that the tightest spot in the labor market, which is most competitive and the hardest thing to attract, is a college graduate for a job that doesn’t have an aura of being a college-level job.

Goff: I think that that takes leadership from the top—whether you’re a five-person organization or you’re a 400,000-person organization—to really reward the fact that we’re putting people into the first entry level of the workforce, or perhaps later, if they’ve got an advanced skill they’ve picked up through some kind of coding school or something, and not be biased by that college degree. It’s extremely expensive.

Fuller: Fred, you mentioned a company that employs 400,000 versus a company that employs five. When you’ve talked about a few of the things you’d like companies to think about, I had a vision of the Business Roundtable-type members. But almost a majority of Americans in the private sector are employed by small and medium enterprises. Do you have specific messages for them?

Goff: There’s some things that cut closer to home for smaller businesses. So certainly having the scheduling and patience around living wage. Opening up a funnel and not necessarily maintaining that you have to have a four-year degree from a school that’s celebrated in your community, but could be a school that’s lesser known. It could be a two-year degree, it could be somebody who’s just picked up skills on their own without that degree. Opening up that funnel is going to help your company, and it’s going to help the community as well. But there’s a really tactical thing, and that’s the predictability of schedules. I saw that political candidates are picking this up lately, and that’s great to see it enter the dialogue, because it’s an incredibly damaging thing for single parents. It’s an incredibly damaging thing for people trying to pursue their education. And so this is also an example where we think capitalism can help capitalism. If you have hourly workers, we get that things change. We get that you’re going to have to have schedules. But you know what? Force things to say, if you have a schedule that’s not two weeks in advance that pays a buck or two bucks more an hour, which should compensate for the fact that that really is an imposition to people’s lives.

Fuller: Well, Fred, those are always very actionable and very consistent with our work, trying to understand what people need from their job in terms of things like flexibility of hours—shifting their hours worked—the ability to accommodate caregiving obligations and other things that are very much in the background, but affect people’s productivity, turnover rates, engagement levels, and often aren’t really captured by employers the way they go about evaluating their workforce or structuring their job descriptions or career paths. Let’s focus a little bit more on the evolution of work and the future of work. Obviously, that’s something we care about here at the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I can see how Jobcase is providing help to people understanding how do I get that position at Walmart? Or reassuring people that giving them the type of social support that would enable them to try to fulfill their aspirations or take a risk. But what we see also in our analysis of jobs is that there’s so much dynamism on the technology side and changes in the pattern of demand that the traditional mechanisms by which people have gotten prepared to work—gotten work-ready—are not keeping up with the rate of change, and that we can only anticipate this is going to accelerate. What kind of role do you see Jobcase playing in helping people prepare for that more-dynamic, more-demanding setting?

Goff: The role we see is probably twofold on how we help them prepare for that. I think the one would be what I’ve been saying, which is a community that can help you identify what should be on your radar and the support of pursuing that.

Fuller: So understand the future adjacencies or understand how adjacencies are going to play out in the future?

Goff: That’s right. Let’s say they’re working at this 7-Eleven I saw when I was driving here. They probably don’t understand that, if they took an online course for Pardot operations, that they can get a job for sales enablement anywhere in Kendall Square for $60,000 a year with benefits. And nobody cares they don’t have a four-year Liberal Arts behind it. Right? So surfacing different pathing.There will be a clearinghouse of sorts of where people have to keep their stuff. We’re no longer in a world where you have the manager in the corner office that’s going to usher you through in your career. People have multiple jobs. They’re driving for Uber to help make bills. They’re working a part-time job. If it’s seasonal work, if they’re fully employed at UPS or FedEx or Amazon, chances are they’re going to be working for Home Depot in the spring, because these are transitional things. So, in a world where you have on-demand labor markets, like Wonolo, and Instawork, and Upwork et cetera, in a world where you have frequent job changes, the data has to be owned by the employee, not the employer. We have to take the praises and the recommendations and all of that and have one place where they keep it all. And within that also is going to be micro-certification badging. I have no problem giving all that information to Indeed, to ZipRecruiter, to LinkedIn. It’s not my information, it’s my members’. But it has to be on a member-first platform that’s going to say this is where you hold it and you can share it wherever. In terms of how to move ahead on the rapidity of change in education, there has to be a place where you surface it and keep your stuff—that’s Jobcase. There has to be a place that puts it on your radar—that can be Jobcase and partners that we work with. And there has to be a community that tells you can do that—which can be Jobcase. And then, hopefully, you’re also getting that from your first-degree connections on Facebook or Snapchat or TikTok or wherever you have those. But on Jobcase, you’re going to get help from a whole broad community that otherwise you might not have access to.

Fuller: Historically, that repository of skills and what bestowed credibility on a job candidate was their educational attainment or the position they’d had previously, and really the employer was the judge as to whether or not those credentials added up to anything. A more visible, transparent, and validated source of visibility in those skills would be a pretty important change in the labor market for non-degree-holding workers.

Goff: That’s our view. I’ll give you an example early on that happened with us. So years ago, we were the first ones to integrate with Uber, so that you’re with one button, an Uber driver could publish his driver rating to his Jobcase profile. So if you have an over 4.5 Uber rating, what does that tell somebody? It tells you a lot. It tells you show up on time, you keep a clean car, you must be good with people. You know who would love that kind of an employee? Home Depot would love that. So early on, we were working with Home Depot who understood that when we had Uber drivers surfacing their driver rating to their Jobcase profile, that became a really strong reference and recommendation for the subset of folks they wanted to pursue and hire into Home Depot. So, as we think about this, this can be such a win-win-win, right? So Uber is helping somebody with x incremental income; that also helps them get experience that they can surface onto a profile that’s publicly accessible and available. And new employers can then discover and already have a point of reference that, “Oh, that’s somebody that would be really good in my shop,” and get a hire. It just helps everybody all around.

Fuller: I know that you survey your members pretty frequently. What have you seen of changes in terms of their attitudes about work, about the economy? And what are they worried about or talking about today?

Goff: The uncertainty about the future. At the end of the day, that’s really what’s behind an awful lot of things I think that we see in the political dialogue, as well as people’s kitchen-table budgeting—which is, there’s no comfort that your current employer is going to have the job for you. There’s no comfort that the job you have is still going to be a valid job a few years from now. I think that the responsibility for people in the technology community, like ourselves, is to ensure that people understand that almost all of the trends that are making the future uncertain. If you lean into it, it can be incredibly empowering. So the AI that’s going to put you out of a job, it’s about putting tasks away, not jobs. It’s going to take a long time to displace whole jobs. And it’s also making education free and available online that otherwise wouldn’t be.

Fuller: Certainly our research here at Harvard Business School has indicated that, while people do understand that there’s a lot of change coming, and it might threaten traditional patterns of employment, and what types of skills are rewarded, they actually are often rather optimistic that good things could happen for them, and that workers around the world, but particularly in the US, feel a lot of agency over that—that they have to own that, that they have to prepare for the future, that no one’s going to do it for them. Do you see that the same way, Fred? And would your data agree with my characterization?

Goff: Our data would agree, our anecdotal observations would agree. I think the kind of people that would come to Jobcase and lean in and participate a lot are the people that are trying to take the reins in. We say we’re a place where people care about others, they drive their own career, and they believe that workers should have as much value as shareholders. I think we can break it down if we think about, if we get tactical about where concerns are in work life in terms of, let’s say, automation and how that’s changing. It’s just new to a lot of white-collar workers and MBAs about the risk from AI displacing jobs. The headlines are about what it’s doing to radiologists, about paralegals, and things like that. It’s now getting six-figure jobs. And so it’s garnering a lot of attention and a lot of future-of-work conferences. And I think that that is valid. I think that that’s helpful, but it’s just catching up to what’s been happening. And you don’t have to be very curious to understand that wage stagnation and what’s happening to the communities where it sits before could happen again. The difference now is we also have the ability of leaning into it and taking advantage of the technology that it’s displacing.

Fuller: So, Fred with that 100 million member population and lots of engaged members on a daily and weekly basis—where you get to see what people are doing, thinking about, asking about—where does that leave you in terms of things you might like to say to employers and to policymakers, governors, mayors?

Goff: Where we can start is a few things, and make them very actionable to CEOs. The first one is: Kill the non-compete. That’s silly. It’s ridiculous. It’s leftover from the 20th century. People are changing jobs frequently. You’re protected by confidentiality clauses and non-solicits in those employment agreements. People will move freely.

Fuller: So these are contractual provisions that prevent a worker from leaving your employment to go work with a competitor?

Goff: That’s right. Franchisees across the country are increasing the use of them and not decreasing them in that. I’m here amplifying the voice of the worker; that’s really what I see my role as. The worker does not want to upset the whole cart of the system and turn it over.Let’s have employers identify which jobs pay living wages and celebrate those. Employers have a responsibility to do two more things then: Provide a pathway to a living wage job within their own company. And if they aren’t going to provide that pathway, they need to be extremely flexible on scheduling. So if an individual is going to find their own pathway to a living wage outside that company, there’s no punitive damages when they say they have to leave at three o’clock to take a class on a Wednesday. So employers have to be a partner. If they’re not going to provide a living wage everywhere, which is probably not reasonable to get done tomorrow, then they have to do pathways. That’s one. The other one is: Today, for the Fortune 500 folks that are listening and the public companies, yes, I understand shareholder buybacks. We understand what’s going on there, and I’m not going to limit that as an avenue that you want to provide shareholder return. But enough with 100 percent of it going to shareholders. Take 10 to 20 percent for a windfall bonus to the employee base. You want to see the communities have an impact? The other one is in the data. You’ve got to free as much data as you can to the employee, themselves, for them to take with them. They are not going to be with you for 25 years, you know that. So if there’s a positive review, if there are skills that they’ve earned internally, if there’s anything kept internally …

Fuller: … demonstrate competency …

Goff: Exactly. You’ve got to share that with that employee so they can put it on Jobcase, they can put it on somewhere else if they want, but they’ve got to own that.

Fuller: Where do you see Jobcase in five years? What do you aspire to? What can you bring forward to try to advance your agenda?

Goff: Where I see us in five years, I guess big-picture wise, globally, with 1 billion members, that’s where we’re heading. Those network effects will allow us to advocate for workers in a much more powerful way than we can domestically with 100 million. To an individual person who is using Jobcase and world, we’re the obvious place to go to whenever they’re thinking about their work life. How to get ahead, what to do, perhaps how to help others. We’re the go-to place where people are keeping their information, which makes it easy, so you don’t have to go digging around for everything, and where you badge your micro-certifications on education so that you can get a call proactively to say, “Here’s a great job for you that you didn’t even know was available.” Right? That’s on the individual side. On the collective advocacy we’re doing, I see us in the boardroom, Joe. I see us sitting right in that boardroom with the Fortune 1000, with public companies. I see us as being the go-to resource to represent this mass amount of workers. I see partnerships with unions—whether it be the SCIU, whether it be the UAW—because we’re all on the same story. But we bring a collective audience that they currently don’t have to add to the equation. And I see us doing this in such a way as a collective. I don’t believe most managers or most board members are in that room looking for an adversarial relationship with their own employees. I don’t come from that angle. But I think they needed to be reminded how this can help them. So we talked about prescriptive things. For the companies that move in favor of stakeholders and workers with actions, we will move consumer dollars. We will move pension investments. We will leverage the strength of this billion-member platform to reward good actors that remember it’s not just about shareholder value, it’s about workers’ value. And if you want to spin that to stakeholders, that’s wonderful. Our position is, it’s workers as well as shareholders.

Fuller: Fred, thanks so much for coming to HBS and sharing with us the story of Jobcase, which is one of the most exciting forums for understanding what’s going on in the workforce in the US.

Goff: Thanks, Joe.

Fuller: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.