LinkedIn for Weed? 24-Year-Old Brings Pot Jobs to the Masses
Are you in the market for a career in a billion dollar industry, but have absolutely no job experience and couldn’t pass a drug test if your life depended on it? Well, ironically enough, what once seemed like an impossible task is now a certified reality, thanks to a brand-new job network focusing directly on finding new jobs in the burgeoning cannabis industry.
An Untapped Market
24-year-old Karson Humiston, a recent graduate of St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, conceptualized an idea for a job-finding network that would cater to recent graduates.
“I started looking into industries that I thought would be exciting to millennials,” Humiston said.
Ultimately, Humiston’s search led to the cannabis field, where she soon realized an abundance of entry-level jobs were available, despite most applicants having little-to-no prior experience in the field. According to ZipRecruiter CEO Ian Siegel, the legal cannabis industry has shown a 68 percent increase in employment opportunities since 2015.
She also discovered the high-growth potential in the industry, and the ability for employees to develop a legitimate career in a market once considered taboo.
In an effort to scour the marijuana job market, Humiston soon found herself in the midst of a cannabis trade saw.
“The first booth I went to was for the Marijuana Investment Group,” Humiston recollects.
The group told her they were looking to fill several positions, but all the candidates required were some generically transferrable skills.
Humiston immediately took to task creating business cards for a company called “Gradujuana”. She wasted no time collecting her things and moving out to Denver, Colorado, where recreational weed was recently legalized, and the job market was plentiful.
She then began the process of linking up prospective employees with various cannabis companies she had previously networked with. She became, in essence, a cannabis recruiter.
However, Humiston soon ran into trouble. She realized the remaining stigma around the cannabis industry was holding her company back from realizing its full potential.
This led Emily to change her company name from the somewhat unprofessional Gradujuana to Vangst, which means “catch” in German. She then hired her own recruiter, and things began to pick up some steam.
The LinkedIN for Weed
Despite some increased success, Humiston still felt she was being overlooked by companies due to her ties to the weed industry.
“Facebook pages related to cannabis business have been shut down,” Emily noted “In general, some job boards don’t let you boost your job if it’s cannabis-related. We had trouble with Indeed,” she added, “Probably because they work with a lot of companies who don’t want to support the industry.This led Emily to develop her own weed-centric, interactive job board for Vangst.
This led Emily to develop her own weed-centric, interactive job board for Vangst. Vangsters, developed by Vangst Talent, allows companies to create unique profiles, post job listing, and conversely, allow job-seekers to connect with said businesses.
Since its inception last month, Vangsters already boasts profiles for 7,900 people and 55 cannabis companies. The site is free for job-seekers, but companies are required to pay $69 a month, which allows them to post unlimited jobs, and have access to infinite candidates. However, that’s undoubtedly a bargain compared to LinkedIn, which is known to charge companies up to $400 for a single job posting.
Humilston says her goal is to fill out 10,000 jobs in the industry within the next three years. “It’s the perfect industry for those who want to grow quickly.” she noted.
With Colorado, alone, seeing $200 million in tax revenue last year, that might even be an understatement.
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