The national nonprofit Basta is proud to announce that it has received a generous grant from the Schultz Family Foundation. This grant will allow Basta to further invest in new tech tools to tackle systemic underemployment, while also increasing lifelong social mobility for early career job seekers.
New AI solutions are poised to change just about everything about how we do business, but few institutions are using new technology to change who does business. Every year, one million college students in the United States are underemployed upon graduation. Research from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation indicates that early career underemployment causes lifelong wage depression, suppressing both wealth accumulation and social mobility. Ensuring that young college graduates find great first jobs is an important first step to closing this gap.
“Despite massive improvements in search and customisation, it’s still surprisingly hard for first-job seekers to find a job that’s the right ‘fit’,” says Basta Founder and CEO Sheila Sarem. “Our Seekr tool helps people do that, and through this partnership with Schultz, we are solving this problem at scale. We’ve begun amplifying our reach by democratising access to Seekr LITE, providing everyone an opportunity to experience the unique impact of Basta’s approach.”
By combining Basta’s proven track record as a national leader in supporting social mobility for underrepresented young people with the Schultz Family Foundation’s dedication to establishing and supporting sustainable career pathways for young adults, the two are finding innovative solutions to career navigation tools, backed by the power of AI. Drawing inspiration from the Schultz Family Foundation’s American Opportunity Index (AOI), Basta will be integrating a new “job match” score into Seekr, its AI-enabled career navigation tool. Eventually, job seekers will be able to upload a resume and job posting link to a large language model, and receive an immediate “match” score, paving the way for additional personalisation and customisation that demystifies early career employment. The “match” tool automatically processes available job postings to filter out irrelevant or misaligned positions, allowing for opportunities that align with the user’s profile to be highlighted. The enhancement of this tool will allow for hundreds of thousands of college students and early career job seekers to access real-time personalised career navigation.
“We believe that with the right tools and career navigation resources, young adults can fully tap into their potential and achieve career success,” said Marie Groark, managing director at the Schultz Family Foundation. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Basta in their efforts to use innovative tools to empower young adults in their job exploration toward meaningful careers.”
“Young people come to us, and they have very little sense of how people actually get jobs,” says Basta CEO Sarem. “Who can blame them? We don’t make this easy, as a society, and our job as an organisation is to chip away at this and other barriers to the American dream.”
