Matching Skills to Dreams: How the Cosmopolis App is Bringing Together Refugees and Their Helpers

More than one hundred million refugees need help today. These are individuals who have had to leave their home countries because of war, persecution, violence, or other serious threats to their safety and well-being. 

When they arrive in a new country, they need food and shelter, but for their long-term well-being, emotional health, and self-sufficiency, they also need to find work. The problem of providing employment for so many people is almost incomprehensibly large. Is it possible to address a situation this big?

Fasten your seatbelts because you’re about to meet someone who doesn’t just think on this scale, she and her colleagues have created a scalable, global-level solution that can help with all kinds of issues that refugees face including, especially, unemployment. 

An Ecosystem that Connects Help Seekers and Help Providers

Paula Schwarz, a native of Greece now living in Silicon Valley, has created a global ecosystem for putting people who need help together with those who want to provide help. Called Cosmopolis, it works by inviting both help seekers and help providers to register on https://www.cosmopolis.app . 

As a real-world example of how Cosmopolis works, a financial service company in Silicon Valley needed to hire 100 people with coding skills. Sensitive to the global need to provide work for refugees, the company committed to hiring individuals from the refugee community. The company registered its hiring needs with Cosmopolis. 

Meanwhile 6,000 miles away in Eastern Europe, refugees with computer skills, have likewise registered and are now in touch with the Silicon Valley company.

Making Jobs Available Isn’t Enough

However, as anyone who has ever worked in an office knows, having the relevant skills isn’t enough to make for a successful hire. To hire 100 people from a distance could easily end up being a costly mistake, one that’s a waste of money and a cause for dissatisfaction on all sides. 

Schwarz and her colleague Ronda Robinson know this. Robinson is a Talent Optimization Strategist from RetainMyTeam™, and she works closely with Schwarz. Robinson sees to it that the refugees who’ve said that they’re looking for coding jobs are invited to make use of the company’s six-minute Predictive Index Kit. It includes a six-minute validated test with millions of data points, and more than 10,000 companies use it to get the right person for the right job.

Getting this right is critical because, as Robinson points out, “Becoming a refugee can be devastating, both mentally and physically. They may have lost every material possession except the clothes on their backs, they’re in a new culture, and they need a job. We can at least help get them the job that they’re wired for, one where their personality is a fit.”

The Predictive Kit asks participants questions that reveal the kind of work situation they’re best suited for. Some of the work preferences the Kit will reveal include: 

• Do you prefer agility and a fast-moving pace, or do you like a slower and more deliberate approach?

• Are you most comfortable making decisions collaboratively or on your own? How important is teamwork to you?

• Do you like things orderly with Standard Operating Procedures or are you, for example, a self-motivated risk taker? 

The Kit helps the job seeker, but the system behind it can also help the hiring company. With millions of data points to go on, the RetainMyTeam™ approach can help the hiring company with the right job descriptions. 

The company’s high-tech approach uses AI and even makes use of ChatGPT’s capabilities. In addition, with the help of the latest language translation capabilities, each side of the transaction can communicate in their own language in real time.

With the help of the Predictive Kit, an individual refugee has a running start for being hired for a job which they have a high chance of succeeding, and the hiring company has an excellent chance of hiring the kinds of employees they really need.

Cosmopolis, gets beyond the barriers of geography or language, and is a global approach to connecting help seekers and providers. It can’t solve the global refugee crisis, but it can make an enormous difference in the lives of uncountable numbers of refugees.