By Riley Kaminer
The US job market is sizzling hot, with 339,000 jobs added in May alone. So if you’re in the market for a new job, now might be the right time to brush the cobwebs off your resume.
Soon after starting to look for jobs, you’ll likely get overwhelmed – it takes up to 80 applications on average to secure a new role. Keeping track of where you’ve applied, what their response has been, and how many further job applications you have pending can become a job in and of itself.
South Miami-based startup Teal can help. The platform aims to take at least a fraction of the pain out of its users’ job search by offering a suite of helpful tech-enabled products. “Think of it as your job search co-pilot,” founder and CEO David Fano told Refresh Miami.
One of Teal’s major features is a Chrome extension that lets users bookmark jobs from any job board and keep track of all their applications in a single dashboard. Through Teal, users can also tailor their resume for each job application by using the right keywords and highlighting the right qualifications. Teal’s platform also automates parts of its users’ job searches, providing insights and recommendations along the way.
Best of all: the aforementioned features are all free. Teal+, the startup’s premium plan, starts at $9 per week and can be billed on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. “We really want to meet jobseekers where they are,” said Fano.
Increasingly, users are also meeting Teal where they are. Since launching, they have amassed 250,000 users – 150,000 of whom signed up this year alone. “We’re a three-year overnight success,” Fano quipped, crediting much of Teal’s rapid growth to the company’s customer obsession and focus on distribution.
Teal has raised about $12 million across two rounds of fundraising: one right before the pandemic and another in 2022.
“We’ve been thinking about continuing to build our audience even when we’ve felt that the product was not perfect,” added Fano. “The intention is clear: we know who we’re serving, so let’s serve them.” Teal has amassed a robust social media presence – including 100,000 followers on TikTok – through its aggressive content strategy. “We’ve been very, very diligent about SEO and content, and now we have about 350 articles on our blog.”
Fano is a Miami native who left for grad school in 2003, then worked in top leadership roles for WeWork in New York among others, returning after the onset of the pandemic. “I thought it would be fun to build down here,” he said.
While Fano noted that Miami is not an engineering hub, he emphasized that Miami’s easy access to Latin America is a major advantage – especially from a talent perspective. For now at least, Fano is the only person in the 18-person Teal team to live in South Florida.
He added that Miami has its fingers on the pulse of contemporary culture. “Miami is really good at riding the wave of the most current zeitgeist – and making money off of it.”
So what about issues of (un)affordability and a perceived lack of talent and funding? “I don’t think it’s harder to build a company in Miami than it is anywhere else,” Fano asserted.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
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