GoBe – The Job Bot, a job search chatbot on Facebook Messenger, launched quietly on December 12, 2016, via a single Facebook post.

In a short 30 day period, while still in beta testing, GoBe racked up some incredible statistics; GoBe, managed over 100,000 messages with job seekers in over 106 countries, and almost all of the traffic and users came from social media shares, likes and comments, like the one below.

“Omg I love this thing! 98 jobs found from two words in 4 seconds. Yes please more!!!!”, T. Johnston, Topeka, KS

When we set out to help job seekers find jobs, we knew that the current job search process wasn’t working for a lot of job seekers. As a 20 year veteran of the Internet recruiting technology market, and founder of one of the first Internet job boards, I knew there were ways to improve the process, but didn’t know what would work best.

So, Mike (co-founder) and I we decided to provide free live job search help via online chat, to help job seekers find jobs, and learn what they needed.

This lead to a lot of short back-and-forth messages with job seekers. We’d ask them a couple questions about their job search. Then, we’d perform the job search for them and send them a link to the results. Then, we’d ask more questions, like “Are these the types of jobs you were looking for?”.

In many cases, the first search results were close, by not perfect. So, we’d ask more short answer questions, continuing this back-and-forth of messages several times, until we got closer to what the job seeker was looking for. (Of course, we tracked every single click, and could watch every user interaction in real-time.)

“Getting accurate job search results wasn’t due to some algorithm, or artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning, it was through a “conversational job search” with multiple back-and-forth, short questions and answers.” Jonathan Duarte, Co-Founder, GoBe- The Job Bot

The “Conversational Job Search” is consistent with how most people might help a friend look for a job, essentially, through a series of short conversations and responses.

Messaging applications, like Facebook Messenger, are perfect facilitators for a Conversational Job Search, because the engagement and response rates are near real-time. It also helps that Messenger has over 1 Billion monthly active users, which if you put it in perspective, is at least 10 times the monthly active users of LinkedIn.

GoBe is gaining loyal followers, because it’s unique, fun, and worth sharing.

Users say GoBe feels like they’re messaging an actual career coach, or recruiter, who is helping them with their job search.

That’s what seems to be getting the users to come back and share GoBe with their friends. It’s not an accident, it’s by design.

In the first 30 days, GoBe is attracting large followings from the US, UK, India, Philippines, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Mobile-first job seekers seem to be the first primary users, which makes sense because they already have Messenger installed, don’t need to download another app, and are the largest segment of the 2.3 billion global workforce. The first set of users are searching for jobs in all disciplines, but retail, sales, driving, manufacturing, and other “non-desktop” type of jobs, seem to be getting a lot of views and applications.

If you’re interested in attracting mobile-first candidates, please email me, jd@gohire.com, or call (949) 287-4154.