Looking for job advice? Try TikTok

Career coach influencers are offering bite- size advice on app

J. T. O’Donnell has been helping people navigate their job searches and career paths for nearly 20 years. But only recently did she start doling out professional advice on TikTok.

Her videos cover job- seeker FAQs, such as whether a hiring manager will be good to work for; how to write an impressive ( but not self- aggrandizing) résumé; and what to do when a potential employer ghosts you.

O’Donnell, 52, is one of several career coach influencers offering bite- size advice on TikTok. She joined the app in December but didn’t start regularly posting until March, when the pandemic began and millions of people saw their jobs disappear and their career prospects shrink. Seven months later, she has more than 900,000 followers.

Although she runs a coaching company and a blog, writes a syndicated newspaper column and is part of LinkedIn’s influencer program, O’Donnell said that TikTok has helped her reach a new audience.

“The TikTok audience is very different than the LinkedIn audience, and that was super important to me,” she said. Its users skew much younger, and many of them have yet to embark on career paths, or even begin thinking about what they might like to do.

Others saw their plans disrupted by this devastating year; in the spring, youth unemployment reached a record high in the United States, and in Europe, people 25 and younger have been disproportionately affected by the crisis. Job insecurity, paired with cuts in college career services, has created a fertile environment for free advice.

“There’s a very expensive business model in coaching, which I think is severely broken, so what we’re trying to do is disrupt that,” O’Donnell said.

In addition to posting tips on TikTok, she has started to offer “micro- payment events” through her company, Work It Daily:

6 ½ - hour live job- search summits for $ 10, weekly 4 ½ - hour boot camps for $ 7, and video tutorials, templates and books for $ 5. The idea is to increase access to information and empower people from all backgrounds in the job market.

Other creators leading the charge on career literacy include Madeline Mann, 28, who is known as the Self Made Millennial; Jenny Logullo, 26, a career coach; and Cathryn Patterson, 42,

out well for Seesaw, a San Francisco company. The number of student posts on its app increased tenfold from February to May, Seesaw says, and the paid customer base has tripled from last year. The app is now used in more than three- quarters of American schools, including big districts such as Dallas and Los Angeles.

“In a matter of two days the world flipped upside down,” said Victoria Lawyer, global sales manager at Seesaw. Seesaw usually pitched large districts for six months or so before one signed up. Suddenly, she said, those districts were saying: “We need to get set up by tomorrow. What can you do?”

But Seesaw’s experience also shows the kinds of hurdles that a company must jump in such extreme circumstances, going through years’ worth of growing pains in a few months.

Other digital education products, such as Zoom and Google Classroom, experienced similar growth spurts and ran into their own problems — such as unwelcome strangers who dropped into those early weeks of Zoom school. But they are public companies with resources to spare. Seesaw had just 60 employees in February, when the coronavirus hit the United States, and was trying to prove that it deserved a tryout for the big leagues.

Small issues that the company knew about but hadn’t addressed before the pandemic became significant problems. Teachers begged for app reliability, but some changes Seesaw made for at- home use didn’t always work smoothly. While Seesaw executives wanted the app to be interesting for students, it had to be streamlined enough for frazzled parents suddenly running at- home school.

All this happened while Seesaw, like many other companies, closed its headquarters and shifted employees to working from home, where many juggled their work with their own children’s classes.

“We’re going through what everyone else is going through in terms of balancing child care and home schooling and working from home,” said Carl Sjogreen, one of the company’s founders. “The intensity of the growth in our business at the same time is a challenge and a struggle.”

Sjogreen, 42, and Seesaw’s other founder, Adrian Graham, 41, first met at Google in the early 2000s. They left, founded a travel- advice startup and moved to Facebook as product managers when it acquired their company. In 2012, they left Facebook and started Shadow Puppet, an app that lets people make videos by adding voice- overs to photos and other social media.

They thought Shadow Puppet was almost embarrassingly simple. But the app proved popular with teachers, and it led to the idea for Seesaw.

In the fall of 2014, teachers trying out an early version of Seesaw reported back with comments that surprised the founders, Graham said. Some students opened up once they had an audio recorder, the teachers said, and some who might not be great writers — and didn’t seem that engaged as a result — made lively videos or digital drawings once those became an option.

In January 2015, Seesaw released the app to the public. It’s free for individual teachers, with a features- added version for schools and districts for $ 5.50 per student per year. The founders took seed funding when starting the company, and $ 8 million more from investors in 2017. Sjogreen declined to give valuation or revenue figures, but said the company would be profitable this year.

And it’s been a year. In February, Sjogreen was mapping out long- term projects from Seesaw’s downtown San Francisco office. Come March, he was working from his Noe Valley house, juggling home- school duties for his 9- and 12- year- old children, just like many of his employees, and Seesaw was in “rapid- response mode,” as he put it.

Teachers such as Sharmeen Moosa, a first- grade teacher at an international school in Bahrain, decided Seesaw would be their remote- learning platform.

“Prior to COVID, I used it as just a digital portfolio for kids,” an online collection of their drawings and recordings, Moosa said, but when her school closed in February, her use “transformed massively.” She used the app for morning messages and daily lessons, adding audio or video clips, posting additional resources, and creating student assignments along with communicating with families.

Many other teachers used the app in similar ways, exposing shortfalls that the company had to race to fix.

Internally, the company had to figure out how to handle a remote workforce that was also, in many cases, dealing with added responsibilities at home. Many employees needed time off at peak hours to handle their children. While being interviewed for this article, Graham bounced his baby girl in a Snugli, while Sjogreen was interrupted by his son, who asked for permission to go on YouTube. ( Sjogreen nodded, resigned.)

Seesaw tried to accommodate employees’ schedules and child care demands, and even added a remote yoga session on Tuesday mornings to clear heads, “but I’d be lying if I said it was easy,” Sjogreen said.

Sjogreen said he had gotten a good idea for Seesaw from his 9- year- old, who uses it at his school. While working from home, Sjogreen heard “tears, frustration” from his son, who had accidentally deleted work completed on the app. The company added a button to confirm deletion — Sjogreen suggested an icon of a crying child to accompany it.

To prepare for the fall semester, Seesaw added 15 full- time employees and 100 contractors to help with customer support. The app kept adding features: Teachers said students didn’t know what to work on first, so the company let teachers designate priority assignments and let students see which assignments were done. Assignments can now be filtered by topic, such as math or Spanish. Users can print posts, and students and teachers can add multiple videos on a single post so teachers can conduct long lessons.

Jennifer Montemayor, a teacher at Bulverde Creek Elementary School in San Antonio, has kindergartners in her remote class who speak Vietnamese, Spanish, Persian or Russian at home. She loves how Seesaw translates her class announcements and assignments into languages the parents can understand.

A Seesaw enthusiast, Montemayor is finding fewer people to proselytize to these days. “Everybody knows Seesaw now,” she said.