Three Amazing Women Banded Together To Create a Job App After Being Unemployed due to the Pandemic

It’s a one-stop platform where creatives and employers looking for creatives can find each other through a convenient network. Yes, we know there’s LinkedIn, but there’s all that unnecessary need to click ‘connect’ with old schoolmates you don’t like just to boost your profile. Oops, yes, we’ve been there.

Websites like Hiredly also cater to various industries, while CC focuses on just creative folk. Since their official launch in December 2021, they have 325 employer accounts such as Universal Music Malaysia and Nestle as well as 2,441 creative accounts.

These three ladies behind the app show that something magical can happen when women in power come together instead. Shermaine Wong, 34, founder of Tish Events (now CEO of CC), Manisha Jagan, 33, founder of MTalent Asia (now CMO of CC), and Lina Esa, 36, ex-Editor of CLEO Malaysia (now Editorial Director of CC) unexpectedly found themselves without jobs like many others during the pandemic.

BluInc (the publisher of CLEO), infamously closed down overnight, laying off over 200 staff across 20 titles. Events dried up for clients of Tish and MTA, an event management company and a talent agency, respectively.

The three ladies then had the idea of creating a unified platform or place that creatives could be discovered, network, get work and collaborate.

Creatives have always suffered certain pain points when it comes to landing a job, from family and friends trying to freeload off their skills to companies ‘hiring’ unpaid interns.

Creatives will also know the pain of trying to fit their skillset into a single CV page, and many are clueless where to start. With CC, your profile is conveniently your brand-new CV portfolio, filled out with just a few easy prompts. They also advocate being transparent with wages, where employers are discouraged from hiding salaries.

The app also offers free services to aid jobseekers community on their journey—they help match them to jobs, do portfolio evaluations/CV clinics, and connect them to resources to hone their professional skills.

This makes them marketable and ready for the workforce. The app does charge employers for posting full time positions while freelance, part-time and internships are kept free to encourage employers to rethink a traditional work model and adopt a hybrid flexible future of work.

So far, they have posted over 200 job posts.

Through Cult Creative, these women are also fighting to get better pay for those in the industry.

Lina Esa said, “I believe the future of work and what we try to advocate via Cult Creative will make creatives (and employers!) take themselves serious as the professionals they are so they can be successful, make and earn real money and ultimately upend traditional structures that think that creatives aren’t essential. They will be able to work from wherever in a location-agnostic world, and get paid what they deserve.”

After all, the producers who make Netflix shows and the creative branding people who make companies get noticed are all necessary, not just lawyers and bankers lah!