Below is my list of submissions within the JobSpotter app. Each submission gets manually reviewed and assigned points based on how valuable that posting was – anywhere from 5 to 150 points. 100 points equals $1 of gift card credit.
As you can see, I earned around 70 points to 80 points for these locations. From my personal experience, taking pictures of generic hiring signs at big commercial banks or Starbucks yields a small number of points (maybe 10 – 20 points). However, taking a picture for a very popular local restaurant (that’s not a chain) can earn you a lot of points (70 points or even over 100 points). That means, on some occasions, I’ve earned over $1 for taking a photo!
Okay, it’s actually two photos. Each submission requires 1) a photo of the hiring sign and 2) a photo of the store name. The app uses your location as well to verify that you physically located at that business.
(Yup, there’s a palm tree at the grocery store. What can I say, it’s California.)
Anyhow, here’s the wallet view within the app. It displays the amount of credit you’ve accumulated. At any point you want to cash out, just hit the “Redeem” button, and an Amazon e-gift card gets emailed to you.
With this money, I purchased a journal, a keyboard wrist pad, slippers, a massage ball, and some other random stuff. It’s fun to go shopping when you have free cash in your account! Unfortunately, it’s almost TOO easy to spend the hard earned money that your legs worked hard for – wandering around the whole city looking for those signs!
Within the app, there’s also a leaderboard that ranks users by number of points they have. The top 3 users each month get an extra bonus gift card ($50 – $300). Pretty sweet! But I will never make it into the top 3 – those people are super serious. I have no idea how they have so much time to take all those photos!
At one point, I was REALLY into this app. I would go out of my way to drive to different shopping center plazas around the Bay Area, get out of the car, and start looking for hiring signs to take photos of. Even in the freezing cold! Well, whatever “cold” means for us here. 😛 It’s similar to Pokemon Go, except instead of looking for Pokemon, I was looking for hiring signs, and getting paid to do it! It was a game that I wanted to WIN! Anyhow, I have calmed down since then. If I see a sign when I’m going out and about in my daily life, I’ll take a photo. If it’s a chain restaurant that probably won’t give me a lot of points, I probably won’t bother.
In case you’re wondering, the app is run by Indeed.com, a popular job site with tons of job postings. I think that this is a great use case for a mobile app. They’re crowdsourcing information from everyday people about who’s hiring in these little suburbs and towns, and giving out rewards as incentive.
Once your submission is approved, you can see it on the Indeed.com search engine by searching “Help wanted” and the city you took the photo in. It should look something like this example. All the fine print and legal details are here. Note: If someone else already submitted a particular sign to JobSpotter, then your submission will be rejected as a duplicate. Within a month though, the online posting will expire, so it’s fair game to go back and take the same photo later. Thus, ideally, you’ll be more successful in a neighborhood where other people don’t use the app.
If you want to try it out, download the app for free from Android or iOS.
Have fun, but stay out of my territory! 😛 Kidding! Good luck!