yolBe aims to create an inclusive community for untapped talent everywhere to easily connect with career-growing opportunities. Through our innovative, mobile-first technology, we improve the lives of our users by helping them build on their social capital through a trusted and comprehensive platform for upskilling, jobs, and support services.
yolBe’s story originated some years ago when our founder and CEO, David Douglas, lamented the lack of positive social capital for many youth and decided to do something about it. The name is short for “Your life only better” and represents the company’s mission to dramatically improve the lives of job and skill seekers everywhere who face barriers to employment by connecting them to the people, opportunities, and resources they need to thrive.
In our early days, we were a ragtag team of passionate volunteers who immersed ourselves in true customer discovery work. We partnered with Bremen High School District and the Chicago Public Schools and created innovative programming such as peer mentoring, internships built around the Lean Startup method, and even hosted a teen expo run almost exclusively by teenagers where we successfully united 1,000 students from 50+ schools and 100 employers big and small.
A key insight we made was just how important organizations like schools, colleges, workforce agencies, community based organizations, and more are in assisting job seekers. We realized that if we can continuously improve the effectiveness of these organizations with magical software then more and more people will find and secure careers of substance no matter where they come from nor what barriers they may face. So we’ve been hard at work building the platform to do just that.
The yolBe platform is a three sided marketplace that allows organizations to host trusted communities bringing together job and skill seekers, opportunity providers like employers, and resources and supportive services.
We share this vision with the city of Milwaukee, a founding partner of ours. The city is using yolBe for DirectConnectMKE (DCMKE). DCMKE, a yolBe Gold Partner, is dedicated to helping the city’s tens of thousands of job and skill seekers find and secure gainful employment in high growth industries using mobile first technology. DCMKE helps by providing ease of building positive social capital, learning new skills through training programs, finding job opportunities, and creating meaningful connections to employers and other members of the community who can provide career guidance. As of 2022, DCMKE has over 50 Milwaukee area workforce agencies on the platform with more to come. The platform is also available to the thousands of employers who want to hire great talent locally.
Our team has been constantly building our product to continually add value to the trusted community we have created. Our mission-driven model inspires us to always find ways to better serve our users and to help make their lives better.
