<aside> <img src="/icons/stairs_purple.svg" alt="/icons/stairs_purple.svg" width="40px" /> Interested in joining our team? Check out Bandana Open Roles. Don’t see an open role but think you’re a fit with our mission? Drop a note to [email protected]
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Bandana is on a mission to improve the livelihoods of hourly workers through transparency and trust, starting with finding better jobs.
At the core of this mission is a broader vision: to re-ignite the belief in the “American Dream” for workers. Specifically, the American promise that hard work can lead to success — and that this applies to all, not just the privileged few. Bandana is For the People.
Bandana exists because people wanted it to. Our initial “Find a Job” platform organically attracted 30,000+ job-seekers, with $0 in paid marketing spend. Shortly after, we raised an institutional seed round of $3.8m in two weeks to hire a concentrated team of all-stars and scale Bandana’s job search platform.
And while we are laser-focused today on our job search solutions, the broader vision is to provide worker-focused solutions to all aspects of life.
Read below for the full Bandana vision and more about our team.
Everywhere you go, your options are poor. Current online search options (ie. Indeed, Ziprecruiter, Monster) lack transparency on pay, healthcare, benefits, & commute.
As a result, frustrated job-seekers often resort to Facebook, Reddit, and word of mouth to find jobs they can trust. And even if they find a good job, that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll get it—or that it’s a good role for them.
In short, there is no clear place for full-time hourly workers to find a better job.
One of many posts of IRL roles in the NYC Jobs Facebook group, which has >170,000 members
The incumbent online job platforms make money when hiring businesses pay to sponsor job listings so they appear more frequently and at the top of the page. Case in point: there are anywhere between 50k-100k sponsored jobs active in New York City on Indeed every day. More broadly, the NYC market alone garners an estimated $1.3bn annually in online job advertising revenue, with net EBITDA margins at 25% or higher.
As a result, job platforms like Indeed try to get workers to see, click, and apply to as many sponsored job listings as possible—regardless of the job quality or fit for the job-seeker. And this has worked…for the job platforms. Indeed alone has built a $6 billion-plus annual revenue business with this model.
The problem? These platforms still treat workers as a replaceable commodity—decades after their founding. They provide little-to-no tools for workers and allow job scams to fester. Existing online job platforms fight to increase the number of clicks for each job listing they show workers — that’s their definition of success. But this does little to encourage transparency, since many of these sponsored jobs that online job platforms are trying to drive traffic to lack full transparency on wages, benefits, and actual job conditions.