Social networking platforms have become a massive part of our society and daily lives. Every second, somewhere in the world, someone is scrolling through a social networking platform on their phone. Especially Gen Z.
Hence, with Gen Z entering and beginning to make up the job market, there is a need and want for more professional networking platforms that cater to the needs of Gen Z.
Bharati Babbar introduces a professional networking platform, ApplyKart. The goal is to aid young job seekers by promoting their skills and qualifications to companies with complementing searches.
The Birth of ApplyKart
On 16 January 2022, ApplyKart was launched in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for individuals to download.
The history of the app began when Bharati recognized from her challenges of moving abroad that there was a lack of additional assistance towards international students and migrants when job hunting.
Though Bharati had a resume filled with experience, after moving to Australia, she spent six months applying for multiple jobs and receiving rejection after rejection before she gained employment from a recruitment company.
“As an employer, I believe that it is easier to review short video clip answers that highlight the essential information in a summarised manner rather than reading through a long resume and cover letter,” said Bharati.
Hence, ApplyKart promotes an easy-to-use app designed to ask the user a series of questions, answered through short video clips. The questions ask about their availability and experience to gain information and summarise the key points for employers to increase the probability of obtaining employment.
As Generation Z is the current and future working group of individuals, the app targets the market of that generation.
The Gadget Generation
Generation Z, born between the years of 1997 and 2012, has grown up in the digital era. TrueList stated that on our planet, there are about 2 billion individuals worldwide now, in 2024, that are a part of the Gen Z category and aged 12-27 years old.
As they were born during the rise of technology, their usage of digital devices tends to exceed the average amount compared to millennials and boomers. A journal article by Critical (2016:10) provided statistics on how more than 33% of Gen Z admit to utilizing their phone, laptop, or tablet daily, in contrast to 27% of Millennials.
Hence, with this generation entering the workforce and some being at the beginning of their career, they are utilizing more digital approaches to search for and obtain a job. The boomer generation began their career journey by applying for jobs through newspaper and TV advertisements. Meanwhile, millennials progressed into utilising online job searching websites. Subsequently, Gen Z has taken the next step in their job search.
This next step would possibly be social networking platforms. Social networking platforms have grown and developed into a widespread global occurrence. Many individuals have carried out studies to produce analytics and results of how 1.96 billion individuals globally utilize social networking platforms (Boyd and Ellison 2008:210; Statista 2015; Vadwa et al. 2016:299).
One of the principal purposes of utilizing social networking apps is to discover, advertise, and share information with other individuals (Hughes et al. 2012:564; Vadwa et al. 2016:299). Hence, Gen Z may prefer social networking apps such as ApplyKart when searching for a job.
The future of ApplyKart
ApplyKart is currently building a global digital footprint to ensure that job seekers everywhere receive the benefits of their app. Additionally, moving forward, the company has plans to provide premium features and subscriptions to users to improve user experience.
Bharati hopes that the platform will improve the job search for the current and future generations moving forward.
Reference List:
Boyd DM and Ellison NB (2008) Social networking sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13:210-230.
Branka (18 February 2024) Generation Z Statistics – 2024, True List https://truelist.co/blog/generation-z-statistics/
Critical V (2016) The everything guide to Generation Z. https://www.visioncritical.com/resources/the-everything-guide-to-gen-z.
Hughes DJ, Rowe M, Batey M and Lee A (2012) A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors. Computers in Human Behavior, 28:561-569.
Statista (2015) Number of social network users worldwide from 2010 to 2018 (in billions). http://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/.
Vadwa F, Stiehler BE and Mashaba N (2016) The influence of age generations on social network usage and behavior. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Southern African Institute of Management Scientists (pp. 299-314).