Background and Press Information

“LinkedIn is not forgiving. This issue goes so deep I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Comment by Lidia on Young People Hate LinkedIn

YouRock was founded in 2013 to support the employability of young people. A crowd-funded hackathon with young people in Lithuania created the visual concept.

The development of the concept was then sponsored by Liberty Global to allow its development for a launch in March 2014. YouRock was a finalist in the European Commission Social Innovation Competition 2014 and a winner of the Telecentre-Europe Digital Inclusion 2015 Awards in the Youth Employability category.

YouRock was developed in response to two emerging issues in relation to youth unemployment and the economic crisis in the EU. Firstly, recent research shows that while 94% of under 25s in Europe are online daily, at best only around 17% of young people use LinkedIn, the worlds’ largest career networking platform. Young people give a range of reasons why they are put off from joining LinkedIn. They cite that their friends are not on LinkedIn and that it isn’t designed for them. They say they have little in the way of employment history and perceive that a lack of work skills would make their profiles look weak. However, employers increasingly look at LinkedIn when reviewing prospective employees and often now use it directly for recruitment.

At YouRock we don’t believe that young people lack work skills, but that they may not recognize all the skills they do have or know necessarily how employers would describe them. We also believe that they do have a wide range of ICT skills and could fill many of these unfilled ICT jobs if only employers knew where to look for them.

YouRock has been created specifically to show that young people have a range of work skills often hidden in the things they do every day and to give them the language of employers to describe those skills. We have designed YouRock to create rich, dynamic profiles that will give employers a meaningful insight into the skills that its users have. YouRock will also encourage its users to see that ICT could be a potential career path.

 

Background (English)

LinkedIn doesn’t matter to the people who need it most, 2013
Why aren’t more college students on LinkedIn, 2013
Millennials & Social Media, 2013
Google Survey, 2012

Press Releases (in English)

YouRock launch, March 2014
EC Social Innovation, Finalist, 2014
Liberty Global support, January 2014
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