Getting to Work

There’s always this debate about refugees—security, integration, belonging, the whole political apparatus. What gets buried is the thing nobody actually argues about: they want to work. Not out of some narrative about becoming part of the community. They want money. A routine. A reason to wake up. The basic human stuff.

I kept running into it in conversations with people who’d just arrived. They were trying to figure out how to get jobs, and the normal systems didn’t reach them. Job boards assumed a network, language fluency, a past you could verify online. Employers looking to hire had no idea where to find them. Two groups that needed each other, completely unable to connect.

David Jacob and Philipp Kühn built Workeer to fill that gap—a job platform connecting refugees with German employers. No mission statement, no performance, just a system that works. Someone sees a problem, builds a solution, it functions. That’s rare enough to notice.

I think about it sometimes—how much friction exists between people who want to work and employers who want to hire, not because of anything personal, but because nobody engineered the connection. It’s not complex. It’s just an actual gap that had to be filled.