To quote Jason Penrod, looking for a job in 2026 “is a dumpster fire.”
When browsing Indeed or LinkedIn during his own job search, he saw postings that were clearly scams, listings that were months old and posts for jobs that appeared open, but were actually filled and just never removed from the website.
“It’s a really combative experience for the job seeker,” Penrod said, “but also, there’s no incentive for any employer to make it better.”
After over a year of searching, Penrod has a job with a local insurance company doing digital marketing. But that yearlong search motivated him to do something to address the problems so many other jobseekers are facing on their search these days.
On the surface, the U.S. economy is supposed to be good for workers right now. In June, Indiana’s unemployment rate was 3.3% — slightly lower than the national rate of 4.2%.
But unemployment rates don’t tell the whole story.
Plus, the most recent jobs data also shows that over a quarter of the unemployed population nationally — nearly 2 million people — have been out of work for about six months. Add in fears and uncertainty about AI’s impact on jobs, and it’s not a fun time to be job hunting.
So, last month, Penrod launched Jobs in Indy, a weekly newsletter that compiles job openings posted in Indianapolis and surrounding areas in the last week. The site was created from software Penrod built himself to try to remove what he saw as some of the worst and most frustrating parts of the job-searching experience.
“It kind of dawned on me that if there was an opportunity for me to build something like this cheaply for the benefit of other people,” he said, “it was going to be now.”
Real, recent and local
This wasn’t Penrod’s first rodeo with job sites.
He spent several years managing a job board for TechPoint, a local nonprofit that aims to support and develop Indy’s tech workforce. So, when he set out to build Jobs in Indy, he knew what he did — and didn’t — want.
Accessibility was key. Some other job sites require you to make an account and fill out detailed information about your career aspirations in order to match you with gigs.
“I just need a gig now,” Penrod said. “I don’t need a college counselor.”
Penrod also wanted his site to weed out “ghost jobs,” or postings that still appear on job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn, but have been taken down weeks earlier by the actual employer.
So, he built out his software to extract job information directly from company hiring websites instead of from these secondary job boards. His newsletter also only compiles jobs posted in the last seven days, meaning they’re up-to-date and actually available.
All of this is in an effort to make it easier for people to get information about jobs that are good, local and real, which takes some of the guesswork out of a process that’s already taxing.
And so far, people seem to be responsive to his efforts. When Penrod first launched the site in mid-July, it got 1,300 views in just over a week.
To him, that’s bittersweet. While he’s happy he made a tool people seem to find useful, it also shows him people are struggling to find work.
“You can only celebrate so much about that,” he said.
Check it out
Subscribe to Jobs in Indy for free to get Indianapolis-area job postings from the past week sent to your inbox every Monday.
Or, check out the website anytime.
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Claire Rafford covers higher education for Mirror Indy in partnership with Open Campus. Contact Claire by email claire.rafford@mirrorindy.org, at 317-759-0249 or on most social media @clairerafford.
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