Lost your job? Here’s how to find openings, resources in California during coronavirus crisis
Hundreds of thousands of California residents have already lost jobs to the coronavirus pandemic, as sprawling “stay-at-home” orders to prevent the spread of coronavirus shuttered non-essential businesses. The fast-spreading contagion is dealing a financial body slam to affected families as well as to the state’s economy.
A wealth of websites, resources, programs and more have been created to help those workers, but if you don’t know where to look, they can be hard to find online.
Fresno-based Bitwise Industries and its software-development arm, Shift3 Technologies, are collaborating with Oakland technology nonprofit Kapor Center, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, LinkedIn and Salesforce to develop OnwardCA.org, a website that aims to serve as a one-stop repository of information and resources for workers displaced by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Bitwise effort is “about getting us back up on our feet,” Newsom said in his daily coronavirus media briefing Thursday afternoon. “Not just small businesses, (but) now people who have been laid off that need a job.”
“Bitwise has already created a remarkable website to match open jobs to individuals in their particular skill set,” Newsom added. “They actually prompt 37 questions to specify where you are geographically, what your exact skill set is, what your wage preference may look like, and then they match you with open job listings throughout the state.”
About 70,000 jobs are already listed on the site, the governor said, adding that he expects the number of listings to exceed 100,000 in the coming days.
“The immediate mission is to put Californians back to work and serve them on their way to achieving that,” said Jake Soberal, Bitwise’s co-founder and co-CEO. “It’s a huge technological and human lift” because of the multitude of scattered resources and the sheer magnitude of the job losses the state economy is experiencing.
OnwardCA aims to provide information and links to resources, based on the user’s location and personal needs, in three distinct tiers of aid:
Immediate sources for monetary aid — from unemployment to industry relief funds for workers to loans and grants for small businesses.
Emergency non-monetary resources — including food, shelter, medicine, groceries, child-care, and more.
Job matching — to pair up workers’ skills with companies that are doing immediate hiring because of higher demand during the coronavirus-precaution measures, like call centers and deliveries of food and other goods. Job-training resources are also planned for people who need to make a change in career after losing their jobs to the pandemic.
Number of workers who could benefit
Soberal said he anticipates OnwardCA would serve as many as 10,000 workers in its first month of operation, 100,000 in the second month and as many as 1 million in the third month.
But matching out-of-work residents with jobs in industries that are hiring takes time. “We all know a job search doesn’t pay for the groceries next week,” Soberal said. “We have to show them how they can get help with food and money and childcare, and help with the difficult journey these workers are on to get back to work.”
Over the longer haul, the pandemic’s damage to the labor force could be long-lasting. “I’m fundamentally an optimist, but it’s hard to imagine the impacts of this displacement being less than a 12- to 18-month struggle,” Soberal said. “OnwardCA is designed for that duration at least, and we’ll keep adding resources and jobs to the platform for that entire duration.”
Newsom’s announcement Thursday unveiling the OnwardCA website came only hours after the U.S. Department of Labor issued new data reporting that almost 879,000 out-of-work Californians filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week. Over the final two weeks of March, as the impacts of stay-at-home orders took full effect in the state, initial unemployment claims topped 1 million. Those represent an economic tsunami that some economic analysts forecast could cost Caifornia as many as 1.6 million lost jobs by June.
On the website, OnwardCA proclaims itself as an “initiative of Foundations and Companies in direct collaboration with State of California Governor’s Office and GO-Biz” to get emergency resources to workers displaced by COVID-19 back to work as quickly as possible.
That means it is a private project, “outside of the state’s web infrastructure but using a lot of the state’s official tools” and operating with the cooperation and support of Newsom and the state, Soberal said.
Newsom “became enthusiastic about this private initiative that was meeting the moment and working alongside the state,” Soberal said. “It gives the governor the ability to say this is the private sector responding in a very powerful way.”
Irma Olguin Jr., Soberal’s Bitwise co-CEO and co-founder, serves on Newsom’s Entrepreneurship Task Force with the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, or GOBiz.
Newsom said Thursday that he was already familiar with Bitwise Industries after visiting the company in Fresno last year. He described it as “the center” of “a remarkable economic story in Fresno and the Central Valley.”
“It’s not just an agricultural community. It’s a vibrant community with remarkable human capital … and a technical expertise that is very present in the Central Valley,” he added.
Soberal said the idea for the website had its genesis in early March — about the same time the first cases of coronavirus appeared in the central San Joaquin Valley.
“We realized that millions of our neighbors in California were about to lose their jobs as an immediate effect of this pandemic,” Soberal said. “We wanted to use our power to deliver a resource that serves them and meets them in that moment.”
About 200 people from Bitwise and Shift3 are involved not only in the development of the website, but also collecting information from public agencies and organizations across the state and entering that into computer systems to build the resource database for users.
“This is what we do. We build technology,” Soberal said. “When this pandemic hit, we determined how to build technology that gets critical resources to our neighbors more quickly.”
This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 12:30 PM with the headline "Lost your job? Here’s how to find openings, resources in California during coronavirus crisis."
