The main feedback Simba Jonga has gotten from early users of the hiring platform Laborup, a startup he co-founded with a student at his alma mater, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, is: Why didn’t this company exist before?
Laborup is designed to connect skilled technicians, electricians and machinists to high-paying manufacturing jobs. Think of it as a LinkedIn for people who don’t spend hours curating online profiles, but still need an online presence to get the best jobs.
Jonga, who graduated from UT in 2022 and then studied artificial intelligence at Stanford, teamed up with former classmate Logan O’Neal, a senior computer science major, to build AI into Laborup. With automation, the platform helps skilled blue-collar workers make resumes in as little as five minutes.
“It’s really about simplifying what it means to be online,” Jonga told Knox News. “These are not people that stare at a screen from 9 to 5. These are people that work with machines, so the only time they have to sit down to actually write out a resume is usually on a weekend or after work.”
After making a free profile, users fill out their experience and skills and the platform creates a resume for them. It gives them personalized job recommendations and connects them to opportunities for free trainings to add more skills.
On the other end, companies can pay to use the platform, searching for talent and contacting candidates to speed and simplify their hiring process.
Jonga and O’Neal first met through the Haslam College of Business in 2019. They immediately shared a love for startups. They began working part-time on Laborup in October 2023, and Jonga took a leave of absence from his graduate studies at Stanford to focus on the startup full-time.
The company is still attracting investors and has not fully launched, though the platform is ready for workers to use. Jonga said he expects to launch in the next three to six months. Already, Laborup has attracted Silicon Valley investors who were early backers of companies like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, OpenAI and Zoom.
The need for a platform like Laborup became clear to Jonga when he worked with pharmaceutical company Bayer AG and Dow Chemical during college. Though the companies had cutting edge technology, their hiring process through staffing agencies or job boards was outdated. When he began speaking with similar companies around the country, he found a pattern.
“When we talked to manufacturers from small machine shops to large Fortune 100s, it takes about three months to hire a good machinist,” Jonga said. “When you parallel that with hiring a mechanical engineer or a design engineer, you have the LinkedIn’s of the world.”
Laborup’s initial focus is the aerospace and automotive industries, though it could expand to include such fields as construction and health care. Its platform launched to a select group of early users in East Tennessee and has already gotten good reviews. One Morristown user said she was contacted by a top manufacturer one week after creating a profile.
Jonga and O’Neal are now hiring largely UT graduates and Knoxville could become the company’s headquarters. The pair are evaluating other cities in the heart of the Southeast’s growing advanced manufacturing sector, like Birmingham and Chattanooga.
High-paying manufacturing jobs go unfilled
In February, there were nearly 13 million employees in the U.S. manufacturing sector and 562,000 job openings, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average salary for manufacturing jobs is around $70,000 and some machinist positions reach an average pay of $95,000 when combined with benefits.
As the U.S. builds more data centers and electric car and computer chip factories, it could have as many as 2.1 million unfilled jobs in manufacturing by 2030, according to a study by the Manufacturing Institute.
By using AI to help machinists and technicians create an online presence and allowing manufacturers to find and replace talent faster, Laborup could become a go-to platform.
Suzanne Sawicki, assistant director of the Office of Engineering Professional Practice at UT, has worked for over 20 years in recruiting at companies like IBM. She said Laborup could cut recruiting down from the industry standard of three months to one month or even a few weeks. It could also level the playing field for applicants.
“The blue-collar workforce keeps the manufacturing wheels turning, both domestically and internationally,” Sawicki told Knox News in a statement. “Laborup will be a game-changer for recruiting in the world of manufacturing. Most manufacturing employees work several shifts within a year, which makes it incredibly difficult to not only apply for a job, but draft a resume to send to a company.”
Integrating AI into hiring for manufacturing jobs makes sense because there are more available positions than qualified applicants, said Tony Schmitz, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Machine Tool Research Center at UT.
Schmitz has been an important mentor to Laborup. He developed America’s Cutting Edge, a joint venture of the Department of Energy and Department of Defense that offers online and in-person courses for machinists.
In a statement to Knox News, Schmitz said Laborup could become an essential support platform for the nation’s growing advanced manufacturing sector.
“By reducing barriers in matching qualified applicants with high technology positions, it will be possible to reduce the workforce challenges faced by U.S. manufacturing both today and tomorrow,” Schmitz said.
Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Phone 423-637-0878. Email daniel.dassow@knoxnews.com.
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