Facing the Mortgage Crisis

St. Louis is trying out something new with a local chapter of the Job
Angels. The idea is to connect job seekers with opportunities in the
region by taking advantage of various electronic and social networking
technologies. It began in September thanks to some funding from the
Regional Chamber and Growth Association and through the efforts of a
few individuals who are savvy about these tools. It may be just what
we all need to help retain and retrain local talent.

It is a simple concept really: harness volunteer power, match up
people who are unemployed with people who can mentor them about their
skills development and self-help, and accelerate the word-of-mouth
process of new job postings by hooking in the viral aspects of
Facebook and other networks that people are using in their daily
lives.

Think of “What Color is Your Parachute” but without the annoying
self-examination exercises. The venerable job seekers handbook may be
on everyone’s shelves, but is rarely followed because, let’s face it,
finding a job is a lot of work.

“We have a lot of talent in town and the idea is to become more
efficient at making the connections among the job pool, recruiters and
employers,” says David Strom, the manager of the group and a local
computer networking consultant and freelance writer and public
speaker. To that end, the Job Angels have established Facebook and
LinkedIn discussion groups and job postings
(see http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=2222626)
and are using Twitter to get the word out (follow them on
@stljobangels). Already more than a hundred people have signed up, and
several job openings have been posted.

“We are the first local chapter of the national organization,” says
Strom. “The idea behind Job Angels is to become hyper-local in its
focus and just connect people in the metro St. Louis region together.”
Activities are already being planned to help people assemble their
electronic profiles or resumes on LinkedIn, and teach people how and
what to do with their first Tweet, what postings to Twitter are
called. “Twitter is being used by a lot of local organizations, such
as traffic updates by the Chesterfield police and customer support for
Comcast cable subscribers,” says Strom. “Now we want to see if people
can get jobs via Twitter as well.”

-David Strom, Manager of Job Angels in St. Louis