FORBES.COM NOVEMBER 30, 20 1946
TECHDISRUPTORSSasha Contreras despaired
when she had to quit her $12-an-hour Xerox cus-
tomer service job and uproot her life in Yelm,
Washington. Her husband was starting work as a
chef at a casino in rural Mississippi in February- A year later she discovered he was having an
affair after 17 years of marriage. Unemployed and
alone, she spent every waking moment searching
Google for jobs. Then she stumbled on Jobcase,
a social media job-search platform for blue-collar
and service-industry workers.
“That site literally changed my life,” says Con-
treras, 55. A free sign-up granted her access to
millions of job listings and a stream of help-
ful posts written by strangers, many of whom
were contending with the isolating experience of
searching for work. Through a link posted by a
member, in late July 2017 she got a customer ser-
vice job that paid $10 an hour. Two years later
Jobcase led her to another customer service job
that paid $13 an hour. Though she’s not looking
to make a move, she logs on to Jobcase daily. “If
I see something that touches me, I’ll respond be-
cause I remember what it was like to be looking,”
she says.
“We’ve got to do this for everybody,” says Fred-LinkedIn for
the Working Class
CONTRARIAN ENTREPRENEURS
By Vicky Valet Photograph by Michael Prince for ForbesHow Jobcase is building a $1 billion social networking site for warehouse employees and waitresses.
Man for the Job
Jobcase founder
Frederick Goff at
his headquarters
in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. In 1991
he hitchhiked from
Toledo to New York
City to land his first
full-time job.