“Was thinking that if each of us helped just one person find a job, we could start making a dent in unemployment. You game?”

That message, sent to 700 people in a Twitter post last January, was the start of something big for Mark Stelzner, a management consultant from Washington, D.C.

Within hours of his original tweet, many of his followers had volunteered to give some of their time to helping others find jobs. Within a day, the conversation had evolved into a full-fledged grassroots movement on Twitter, with additional efforts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

And just like that, JobAngels — a social networking movement that connects job-seekers with “angels,” or employed mentors for career networking purposes — was born.

Last week, Stelzner spoke about the movement at a meeting of Christians Are Networking (CAN), a Catholic Charities-run job ministry that meets weekly at St. Martin de Porres Senior Center in Alexandria.

“The way we search for jobs is broken,” Stelzner said. “We’re hoping to demystify that experience a little bit.”

The way JobAngels hopes to do that is by connecting people to each other and making introductions, so that when a job-seeker presses the submit button on an online job application, there will be someone on the other side vouching for him and ensuring his resume does not get lost in the crowd.

How it works is simple. Job-seekers log on to their Twitter accounts and send messages to JobAngels with a brief description of the position they are looking for and their location. JobAngels then tweets that message to its more than 12,000 followers. Each person mentioned receives instant exposure to thousands of people. The hope is that at least one of them will be able to give that person insider advice or even connect them with an opening in the field.

JobAngels has been up and running since January and since then more than 1,500 people have found jobs through connections through the site. Many of those people have since returned the favor by working as “angels” for other people looking for jobs.

“It’s just people helping people,” Stelzner said. “We’re just reminding people to do what they know they should already be doing.”

For Stelzner, the growth of JobAngels in the last year has been a tremendous shock.

“It’s been very humbling and a bit overwhelming,” he said.

Within one week of starting JobAngels, Stelzner was written about in The Los Angeles Times. Since then, he’s been on NPR, CNN and in The Wall Street Journal and has given talks to more than 300,000 people about the movement.

Stelzner says the way in which JobAngels has taken on a life of its own has been inspiring.

“One good thing that has come out of this period of unemployment is that there’s a tremendous amount of empathy,” he said. “There’s this sense of ‘we’re all alone together.’ It’s the everyman and the everywoman who are suffering. There’s no ‘oh, that just happened to them.’

“It’s rewarding to the extent that I’m giving a little bit of realistic and pragmatic hope to these people,” he said. “And the fact that it works without me. I think it’s the coolest thing.”

Katie Bahr can be reached at kbahr@catholicherald.com

On the web

JobAngels.org

Twitter.com/JobAngels

Find out more

Christians Are Networking (CAN) meets every Thursday from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at St. Martin de Porres Senior Center in Alexandria. Since June, they have helped 13 local job-seekers find employment.