About / Mission / Impact
SMARCH is a structural response to unemployment. We help people build new opportunity together through matched teams, guided collaboration, and a mission-driven programme.
Structural Response
SMARCH is designed to create new opportunity, not only help people compete for the same limited openings.
Team Formation
Participants are matched into complementary teams so skills, motivation, and working styles can reinforce each other.
Mission-Driven
The platform is built around public value, participant progress, and long-term systems change rather than short-term transactional placement.
Built in Sweden
SMARCH is being organized as a Swedish Ideell Förening and developed as part of the Valleyberg ecosystem.
Why SMARCH exists
Too many people stay trapped in long job-search cycles even when they have useful skills, strong motivation, and real potential. SMARCH was created to offer a more structural path forward.
Instead of treating unemployment as a problem solved only by screening people for existing roles, we focus on helping people form teams, develop real project direction, and build toward new opportunity together.
How the model works
- Participants complete one structured application.
- SMARCH matches people into complementary teams.
- Teams work through a guided 6-week collaboration process.
- The goal is to create real traction, clarity, and new opportunity.
- Hiring-partner visibility can exist as a secondary path, but it is not the core mission.
Institutional story and theory of change
SMARCH is part programme, part platform, and part long-term intervention model. It was built around a simple idea: when people are excluded from opportunity for long periods, the response cannot be only more screening into the same limited openings.
That is why the platform focuses on structured collaboration, team formation, and practical venture-building support that can create new opportunity instead of only redistributing existing roles.
In that sense, SMARCH differs from standard recruitment systems. It is designed to help people build traction together first, with hiring-partner visibility kept as a secondary option rather than the organising principle.
Current evidence and status
- SMARCH has moved from early team-formation experimentation into a live cohort-based operating model with a structured programme and participant portal.
- More than 300 registered users and 200+ complete applications were gathered in roughly 3 months without paid acquisition.
- Cohort 1 launched on January 26, 2026 and currently includes 61 participants and 12 teams formed.
- The average job-search duration in Cohort 1 is 11.8 months, which means the model is reaching people who often remain outside the normal opportunity flow for extended periods.
Why public-sector collaboration matters
SMARCH is designed to work alongside institutions, not pretend they are unnecessary. It can serve as an operational complement for people who need a more structural path than transactional recruitment alone can offer.
That makes the model relevant not only for participants, but also for municipalities, employment support systems, and long-term unemployment interventions looking for ways to help people create new opportunity together.
A mission-driven initiative
SMARCH is being built by a small founding team across product, design, operations, and technology.
SMARCH is actively running its second cohort and exploring institutional partnerships across Sweden as part of the Valleyberg ecosystem.
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