Job hunting is the worst. After you spend hours navigating hundreds of job boards and company career sites, you send out a few dozen resumes and hope that at least a handful will make it into the hands of an actual, real-life person.

But more often than not, those job applications get chewed up by any number of automated systems that care more about hitting the right keywords than finding the best employee.

The usual mantra of the job hunter is “you have to know someone,” and that is exactly the problem Dallas-based startup Jackalope Jobs is looking to solve.

“Most recruiters and job boards focus on helping employers.” CEO and co-founder Sudy Bharadwaj told me. “They want to find five good candidates for one position. We want to find five good opportunities for one job seeker, and we want to do it using the network you already have.”

How it works

Jackalope Jobs integrates social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn with data from hundreds of job boards to match job postings with personal connections. A person searching for a certain job will see a list of friends whose companies are hiring in that field, along with information about the available positions. They can then use Jackalope’s contact tool to send those friends a message with details about the job openings they are interested in.

“When you are looking for a job, do you want to talk to a recruiter or a hiring manager, or would you rather talk to a friend?” Bharadwaj asked me.

The site offers several search options and filters to locate the best opportunities and the most valuable personal connections. Users can search by job type, company, location, and so on, as well as by specific friends. They can also create custom alerts that will notify them if a friend’s company adds a new job posting, or if a new connection works for someone with relevant job openings.

Jackalope also uses semantic-based search technology, so it is capable of finding jobs that match a person’s interest, even if they do not match their exact search terms.

According to Bharadwaj, most job seekers will send out about 30 resumes for every interview they get, but reaching out to a company through a friend has a much higher success rate. During a pilot program for Jackalope, that number was reduced to 11 resumes for each interview, and people who successfully landed a job averaged around 5.3 resumes per interview.

Bharadwaj said that Jackalope’s mission is to help 4 million people find a job by the year 2020.

photo credit: Scrabble – Profession via photopin (license)