The Volunteer Organization That Finds You A Job

Early in January Michelle Catania heard about JobAngels from a friend. It couldn't have come at a better time. She signed right up--and she's very glad she did.

JobAngels had just been born. It started when Mark Stelzner, owner of a small human-resources consultancy in Washington, D.C., sent a message to his 650 followers on Twitter saying, "What if each of us helped one person find a job. Are you game?"

"The response was immediate and overwhelming," he says.

His message was retweeted (forwarded) more than 150 times within minutes. A few hours later it had produced a budding movement called JobAngels, with a Facebook page, a LinkedIn site and a mission: to help bring people together in a community setting where each person commits to a single goal--helping just one person find gainful employment.

People started sending Stelzner messages about job openings and their willingness to mentor job seekers, so he could post them on Facebook and LinkedIn and forward them on Twitter. Job seekers started replying to those messages.

Catania took JobAngels to heart. Her hometown of Richmond, Va., had been hit hard when a major employer, Circuit City ( CC - news - people ), closed its doors. She knew many of the layoff casualties. Then she herself got laid off from her job as comptroller at a publishing company.

She sent Stelzner a message saying she wanted to be a job angel, a volunteer who advises job seekers on forming a job search strategy and writing a résumé and a cover letter.

"I figured what I needed to do was what I'm best at," she says. She had once been a hiring manager. "I knew of specific job opportunities in the area, and this is a small town. People won't forget that. If I can help, someone will pay it forward."

Catania has now mentored about 25 people in their job searches, and she has noticed some trends among them. "Everybody's cover letter was an atrocity," she says. "They weren't personalized and didn't show their understanding of the position or the company."

Her first mentee got a job at a software company within a few weeks. Another person she advised landed a marketing job at a global law firm within a month.

And she was right that helping others would help her. A fellow JobAngels member tweeted her a posting about a finance position at a local nonprofit. She applied and was hired. She started work at the end of February.

She hasn't stopped advising job seekers, though. She wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to peruse résumés and cover letters. She's back at it after work and often has to drag herself away from the computer to go to sleep at 1 a.m.

This couldn't make Mark Stelzner happier--or more surprised. In its three months JobAngels has built a following of more than 12,500. He doesn't know how many job seekers have found work as a result, since connections are made so informally, but "we know it's in the hundreds," he says, judging from how many stories he hears.

JobAngels remains a very casual operation because Stelzner and his team don't have the means to enable formal introductions. Some job seekers and volunteers simply tweet to everyone signed up to follow JobAngels on Twitter. Other connections arise when people peruse announcements on Facebook or join the group on LinkedIn and communicate through that.

Stelzner and his five-team board all work remotely as volunteers. They have never met. Their next order of business is to get a Web site up and running, which will help them formalize the process of pairing job seekers with mentors. "Right now we put announcements out there and keep our fingers crossed and hope people find each other," Stelzner says. "With the Web site we'll do extensive profiling so the right people connect."

He hopes to have JobAngels.com up in May. It will include a questionnaire where users can enter their location and areas of expertise and pick from drop-down menus to indicate their professions and what they're looking for. Eventually he'd like to make it a go-to site for all sorts of job-related content and listings of local job boards.

Even human resources professionals are taking note. Becky Allen, a recruiter for Serco North America, a global management services firm, was using Twitter professionally to follow other H.R. people when she heard about JobAngels. She liked the idea of one-on-one job-seeking help, so she tweeted about three positions in Puerto Rico she had been unable to fill.

Within days, she had hired for all three, thanks to JobAngels.

"It's the first place I go to now," she says. "It's a great collaboration tool."