KarirLab

• >90% of higher education institutions have limited career development office presence

• ~40% of unemployed graduates are still unemployed 12 months after graduation (ADB, 2016)

• Typical persona of individuals that we serve:

  • Annisa, 21, fresh graduate from Aceh: lacks stories in her resume & professional profile; she is focused on academic work, paying very little attention to extracurricular activities

  • Dika, 20, sophomore from Jakarta: struggling to find professional guidance from his university and network -- he is graduating soon but unsure about potential careers to pursue

  • Henry, 27, analyst in Manado state enterprise office: seeks to switch career, but his (lack of) English prevents him to find decent jobs

• KarirLab is bridging these gaps. We provide virtual career and professional development services to university career offices & early-career individuals. At the same time, we are working with employers at both local and regional level to continuously validate our approach.

In Indonesia alone, there are 50+ million individuals aged 20-34 years within the workforce. Each year, there are ~10+ million career switchers and 1+ million fresh graduates ready to start their career. OECD report on Labor Market in Indonesia indicates that most young people currently find jobs through personal connections. Over 40% of young people aged 19-29 report contacting friends or relatives to find a job, making it the most common job search method (OECD, 2020). And so, it is not surprising if ~40% of unemployed graduates are still unemployed 12 months after graduation (ADB, 2016).

These fresh graduates come from 4,000+ public and private universities in the country. McKinsey (2019) stated that educational institutions play an important role to help companies fill the skill gaps and needs by focusing on skills most relevant in the future. More than ever, these universities are facing pressures to catch up to cater to post-COVID demands from a more digitized, frictionless job market and non-traditional skills requirement. However, more than 90% of top 1,000 universities have no formal career services. 

With a relatively young population and significant room for growth, Indonesia is well positioned to benefit from the productivity gains and new opportunities from automation and future of work. One of the priorities includes: scaling and reimagining job retraining and workforce skills development (McKinsey, 2019). Providing job retraining and enabling individuals to learn marketable new skills throughout their lives will be a critical challenge, one that KarirLab is well-positioned to serve. 

Typical fresh graduates and career switchers in Indonesia and greater Southeast Asia have similar characteristics:

1. they lack ‘stories’ in their resumes from lack of experiences or storytelling skill 
2. they lack professional guidance from school, university, and personal network to guide them to navigate through recruiting processes 
3. they speak English as their second language. 

KarirLab’s main value proposition focuses on:

• enhancing our user’s prospectiveness to achieve their professional goals,
• serving professional development and career-related services on-demand at scale,
• providing content and service delivery using the local language to make candidates feel at ease.

• KarirLab’s instant resume services prepare college students and early career individuals to secure better employment outcomes through standardized job applications 

• KarirLab’s solution (career platform, targeted classes and virtual coaching) for higher education institutions and university partners equips graduating students to be industry-ready in navigating job markets in Indonesia

Tessa Saraswati. She previously worked in the Minister of Education’s office, where she led the roadmap development for one of the “Independent Campus” programs.

Tessa holds an MBA from Yale University and a Bachelor of Economics from Universitas Indonesia, with 4 years of experience at McKinsey & Company.

KarirLab sees technology as an enabler to deliver solutions at scale: moving from a 1:1 labor-intensive approach to a self-paced service in local language (addressing English as a language barrier). Our classes and modules are part of the university/school’s supplement program, which ensures higher absorption of learning and accessibility to prepare students for the job market.

KarirLab is transforming what was once an individual-centric, offline, and relationships-driven process of researching career resources, building and evaluating resumes, and career coaching into a web-based service platform with self-paced access and virtual classes to cater to students/individuals’ needs in their job/internship search and career journey.

As a company, KarirLab aims to focus not only on growth but also on our impact. We are deeply committed to our ToC as follows:

Following our impact logic model, we are committed to be a double-bottom line enterprise. We are looking to empower as many higher education institutions as possible and onboard partner organizations (businesses) to transform the future job market in Indonesia by deeply engaging with our partners in lowering youth unemployment in Indonesia.

KarirLab deeply believes we are supporting 2 SDGs: #4 Quality Education and #8 Decent Work for All. 

We are democratizing access to localized content and soft skill education through KarirClass and our career office platform. Our core products empower early career individuals to be more confident in their career journey. Our progress towards impact is measured by the growth (by number of users) and satisfaction (NPS and retention) of users that we serve.

Moving forward, we are working with our partners to measure (un)employment outcomes of the students who have subscribed to our services.

We identified two types of potential barriers: Financial and Operational

• Financial: potential fundraising required to support our product and business development activities 

• Operational: potential challenge to onboard higher education institutions and fill in internal talent gap (e.g., data scientists) for growth plan

Looking at the barriers that we identified, we have developed a plan to overcome those barriers:

Financial: plans to fundraise in the near future; while balancing revenue from existing services to cover our operational expenses 

Operational: 

• Partnership acquisition: establish long-term partnership with local govt, higher ed institutions, and local ecosystem players. 
• Internal talent: leverage the network of our advisors (experts in HR and recruitment in Indonesia; backers) to widen our talent pool

We currently have 12 people in our team, including 2 co-founders, 1 engineering lead, and 1 business development manager. 

• Our co-founders: Tessa is a certified career coach, with experiences in projects related to public sector, education, and the future of work; while Stephanus is active in national-scale youth leadership development and mentorship program across different organizations in Indonesia
• Our team is comprised of graduates of local (90%) & international universities (including one senior engineer who had some college but completed software bootcamps!), who have gone through virtual job search processes and tried our resume services (100%), working across different parts of Indonesia (remotely from 9 cities!) -- we are a true sample of 50+ million young Indonesians who are within the workforces

• Diverse leadership team, female CEO, different sub-racial backgrounds within leadership team (co-founder and leads)

• Values and commitment from co-founders:

  • Gender inclusion across teams - impartiality upon hiring

  • Creating an environment in which everyone feels welcome

  • Continue to educate new hires on the importance of having diverse teams

• Actions taken

  • Embracing remote working to enable diversity of workforce from different regional backgrounds within & outside of Indonesia

  • Hiring impartiality: filter questions based on targeted performance-related criteria, no questions asked on backgrounds, gender, orientations

  • Board of advisors and mentors from different expertise, genders, sub-racial backgrounds in Indonesia

To date, we have ongoing partnerships with 2 higher education institutions and 1 NGO (focusing mainly on digital economy empowerment) in Indonesia. Through these partners, we co-hosted a series of professional development classes, covering 1,000+ students, with ~10% conversion rate to our resume review service. 

In Q4 2021-2022, we are undergoing discussions with 10+ potential university partners for our virtual career office services and a number of Southeast Asian tech startups and unicorns for potential commercial partnerships.

We define the target operational model for our key stakeholders as follows:

• Early career individuals and career-switchers: all in one platform related to career (from preparation, search, and early career navigation).

• Higher education institutions: to offer best-in-class career services to students, helping graduates to navigate their career aspirations. 

• Companies: help them to source the right talent more efficiently and effectively (ATS friendly Resume), offering an upskilling platform and wellness for productivity improvement.

• Government: help government institutions to solve for 2 SDGs: #4 Quality Education and #8 Decent Work for All.

• We see MIT Solve as a prestigious community and platform that could connect us to like-minded organizations and communities globally, as we believe our solution is the first of its kind in the Southeast Asian market 
• As a community under MIT -- a world-class higher ed institution within the tech space, we seek to learn new ways to leverage tech in digitizing the delivery of soft skill training & education; we've learnt that educating higher ed behemoths in Indonesia to adopt new technology could be an initial trial barrier

• As a company, we believe we are on a social mission to solve a core problem of 50+ million young adults transitioning to/within the workforce; we believe our impact on partner institutions and students goes hand in hand with this Future of Work challenge in Indonesia.

Product & service distribution: working with both private and public higher education institutions towards digital platform adoption as a supplement for academic & classroom activities