Joshua Nybo, BizPac Review | September 23, 2021
Looking for a job that doesn’t require the Covid-19 vaccine? Or a rainbow flag logo in June? Well, now there’s a website for you.
RedBalloon, as the site is called, was originally a job board for locals in Moscow, Idaho. Created by Andrew Crapuchettes, who said he started it “for fun” in an interview with Fox Business.
However, it didn’t stop there. As soon as he created a video advertising the new jobs site locally, people started contacting him from across the country. The questions were always the same: when would the site go national? In August, the site did, and now features listings for jobs across the country.
As Crapuchettes told Fox, “The whole thesis of the job board was ‘free to work.’ What if employers treated their employees like adults and didn’t require vaccinations or certain pronouns, or making their logo a rainbow flag in June and just let people work and left identity politics out of the office space?”
Unsurprisingly, the website was mostly popular with conservatives at first, the group most likely to be hesitant about the Covid-19 vaccine, and least likely to list their preferred pronouns in a description about themselves. However, Crapuchettes said that people from across the political spectrum have been advertising their resumes on the site. He also noted that the response has been “overwhelming.”
One of the employers who has used the site is Canon Press, a Christian publishing company. Jess Hall, CEO of Canon Press, told Fox Business that RedBalloon has been extremely helpful for him to match with job applicants who share the company’s values. Unlike most companies experiencing a dearth of job seekers, Canon has been flooded with people, something that Hall attributes to a tendency to look to God in times of “tyrannical” government overreach, and he gave the lockdown responses to Covid-19 as an example.
“So I threw those up and then tossed out a few other hopeful jobs just to kind of fill out the job board for Andrew [Crapuchettes], and I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of candidates that I got for all the positions and the quantity, given that the thing had just started,” Hall told Fox.
According to Hall, the size of the company has tripled in the last 2 years, and with RedBalloon, he’s getting applications even from foreigners, such as Canadians seeking to escape their nation's restrictive lockdowns. Another company pleased to list jobs on Red Balloon is Maddox Industrial Transformer, which provides electrical transformers to a variety of clients across North America, from Tesla to Dollar General Stores. Camden Spiller, CEO of Maddox Industrial Transformer, said to Fox Business that after hearing about the job on LinkedIn and signing up, he is preparing for a huge influx of new hires, and that many of them are people willing to give up long-term careers and more lucrative salaries to work for his company.
“I’ve got friends running global, multibillion-dollar businesses telling me, ‘I’m struggling to find people.’ Small little American businesses like ours are struggling to find people. But for those that let it be known that they’re not going to force these ideologies, there’s a tremendous amount of people out there — more than we could possibly take in,” said Spiller.
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