Daily Endeavor Blog

We all have a home on the web. Whether it’s a Linkedin profile, Twitter feed or Facebook page, there’s a definitive place people can go to find you. When there’s a definitive profile, it’s easier to learn about and connect with you.

So everyone who wants to be found has a user profile. Similarly, every company has an About Us page. But what about every job? There’s no single place to learn about every type of job.

Wikipedia does a really good job providing an objective description of many of the industries that exist, but not every job in, say, investment banking is the same, and ongoing conversation about how to get or thrive in an investment banking job is not part of its mission.

There are millions of job listings that narrowly describe the needs of a certain company at a certain time, but any given type of job can have 20 or more different titles, so researching or tracking even one job is a huge hassle.

The idea to build a job graph is a simple one: we believe that every job should have a home page on the web — a definitive job profile. Each profile should be a place where you can learn about the job and join the conversation that’s happening around it. It’s a place where you can show what you know, or share what you want to learn.

While the idea was simple to start, building it has been anything but. Our initial research four years ago found that the largest classification system was the US Department of Labor’s. But there was a problem. Their coverage for the entire US economy added up to about 3,500 types of jobs. That’s less than 2% of our estimate of the 250,000 non-hourly jobs. We needed something much more comprehensive. So we decided to build one from scratch.

For three years we’ve been working with niche experts to develop a graph that’s representative of the types of jobs that exist today. While we’ve made a lot progress (15,000 and counting), we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, we’re really excited about how a profile for every job can help job seekers better find personal matches, and hiring managers better find the needles in the haystack. If there’s job profile coverage you’d like to see, please let us know!