dearCC Launches Free AI Career Coach for Gen Z Jobseekers

A free platform called dearCC is launching this month, promising young jobseekers something no job board offers: an AI-powered career navigator paired with real human mentors. The platform comes from the nonprofit New Work Foundation, co-founded by former Meta and Salesforce AI executive Clara Shih and technology industry veteran Nick Mehta, and arrives in one of the toughest entry-level job markets in recent memory. "The bottom rung of the career ladder is disappearing," Shih said in the launch announcement, pointing to AI systems that automate tasks that once belonged to junior hires.

According to the announcement published on PR Newswire on October 1, 2026, dearCC combines human mentorship and peer cohorts with real-time labor-market intelligence and practical AI-skilling tools, aiming to show young workers where opportunity exists and which capabilities they need to reach it. The launch is backed by a multi-year grant from the Schultz Family Foundation, plus founding support from names including Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal, Aaron Levie, and CJ and Meera Desai, along with technology grants from Salesforce, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Vercel.

The timing is hard to miss. MarketWatch reported in late September that there were 245,000 unemployed people aged 20 to 24 with no prior work experience, the highest August figure since 2014, according to an economist at Fifth Third Commercial Bank who tied the rise to AI's workplace impact. Research from ADP and Stanford University found that August employment for workers up to 25 in jobs highly exposed to AI fell 4.4% from the year before. Federal data tells a similar story: recent graduates whose majors traditionally fed roles that are easily automated were less likely to land a job within a year of graduating and saw lower pay, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Dallas Fed research.

The stakes go beyond one slow first job. Burning Glass Institute president Matt Sigelman, whose team's analysis of tens of millions of career histories is baked into the platform, said the jobs graduates land, the skills they build, and the companies where they build them can shape their trajectory for years to come. That makes the first job not just a paycheck but a compounding asset or a compounding setback.

How dearCC works: AI tools with a human spine

The centerpiece is a jobs explorer called Field Report, which shows which roles are growing, flatlining, or being reshaped by automation. Users can search by college degree and compare AI exposure, wage trends, adjacent high-growth occupations, and where openings are clustering geographically. The data layer draws on employer-quality and economic-mobility research contributed by the anchor partner's Where You Work Matters work, so the guidance reflects employer quality, not just job volume.

A second tool, called Game Plan, grades a jobseeker's LinkedIn profile, resume, and current strategy step by step, then pairs that assessment with hands-on ways to build AI capabilities relevant to the target role. Users get a personalized gap analysis, outreach recommendations, interview preparation, and portfolio-project ideas meant to make them stand out in a screening pile.

The human layer comes through Community, which hosts monthly master classes led by working executives: Codesmith founder Will Sentance, former Slack chief product officer April Underwood, former Color Health chief marketing officer Katie Stanton, and Benchling chief accounting officer Michael Matlock are among the mentors. Jobseekers can also join a Crew, a group of six peers who meet weekly with a field mentor for structure and accountability, and a Weekly Brief newsletter personalizes coverage of how AI is reshaping each user's target occupations.

Why mentors, not just algorithms

The pitch is that automation caused the isolation, so the fix has to be partly human. Jesus Garnica, a first-generation graduate of San Mateo Community College and San Francisco State, said the platform gave him "the community, inspiration, and AI skills" to land a job after a year of searching. Samantha Wen, a 2023 Berkeley graduate and Gen Z co-founder of the foundation, put the appeal bluntly: staring down 500 unanswered job applications, she said, jobseekers need "a plan for a specific job and a group of people who will give you straight talk." Ryon Baldwin-Williams, a 2025 Michigan State graduate, said the platform unstuck his search and gave him a lasting community.

The service is entirely free and available now, and the nonprofit behind it runs with an all-volunteer leadership team drawn from companies like Salesforce, Smartsheet, and VMware. That lean structure is part of the bet: no subscriptions, no upsells, just a toolkit for the generation being told to "learn AI" while the hiring door narrows.

The skeptic's view: no app prints job offers

The counterpoint writes itself. Career coaching, however well designed, cannot manufacture entry-level openings. What it can change is how candidates compete, and plenty of young workers are bypassing the application queue entirely. Gusto research found seven in ten Gen Z founders used AI to start their business, and a Bank of America Institute economist noted in June that business applications from Gen Z customers grew disproportionately year over year. When the front door is locked, more young people are building their own.

That tension is the story underneath the launch. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of young graduates sending applications into the void, the platform offers a roadmap instead of isolation: where to aim, what to learn, and people who have been through it. We previously covered how AI is already narrowing the entry-level pipeline in The Junior Squeeze: AI Is Shrinking Entry-Level Hiring, and you can find more guidance like this in the Career Path section.