Congratulations! You just landed an interview for what sounds like a pretty sweet job. All that time you spent tailoring your cover letter and résumé really paid off. You tell your boss you've got a doctor's appointment, leave work and go in for an interview. But then you do a double-take as you stroll through the parking lot: There are a lot of Hillary Clinton bumper stickers, and a few Bernie Sanders stickers. One old Volvo even still has a Nader 2000 sticker. This worries you, because you're a Republican. It would be nice, you think, to work with people who share your views, or at least won't judge you for them.

A few years ago, when the job market was at it worst, you might have sucked it up. Today, though, you've got options. Had you known the place was a den of liberalism, you wouldn't have bothered.

Even when times are tough, there are certain things that job seekers value in a potential employer.

You could have avoided this situation by checking a site like OpenSecrets to view employee political contributions and get a sense of a company's overall political vibe. But what if you could simply filter Democratic or Republican leaning companies out of your job search altogether? CareerLabs, a job search site launching today, lets you do just that, and a whole lot more.

Much like other job aggregation sites such as Indeed and Simply Hired, CareerLabs gathers job listings from around the web. What makes the company different is the ability to filter those job listings based on data that CareerLabs has collected about the employers that posted those jobs. For example, you can filter out companies with low work-life balance scores, or search only for jobs at companies that are growing rapidly. Founder and CEO Anthony Van Horne says the most popular tool during beta testing was employee morale, which is based in part by scraping social networks like Twitter to get a sense of how happy a given company's workers are. And, yes, thanks to the wonders of public data, CareerLabs will tell you about the political leanings of a company's management. CareerLabs also is working on a filter for the number of gender or racial discrimination suits filed against companies so job seekers can screen out companies that might be unwelcoming of women or minorities.

Pay to Play

There are obvious limitations, most obviously the availability of data. Van Horne says CareerLabs is tracking more than 22 million public and private US companies, but of course some will be left out. Newer and smaller companies, meanwhile, will have produced less data than older, larger ones. Still, the basic idea is to provide a better window into the companies.

Van Horne sees it as a fundamental reversal of how the job listing business works. Whether you're scouring the classifieds in your local paper, searching Craigslist, or surfing job postings somewhere, the model remains the same: a business pays to list a job ad, and provides as much or as little info as it wants. Everything happens on the employer's terms. CareerLabs flips that by aggregating outside information about a potential employer.

The catch is that while a typical job search site makes money selling ads to employers, CareerLabs wants to be independent of those companies. That means it must convince job seekers, not employers, to pay.

To do this, CareerLabs is offering a basic version of the site for free, and a number of premium filters that Van Horne believes job seekers will be willing to pay for. The ability to filter by work/life balance ranking is free, but you'll have to pay to filter results based on the amount of funding a company a received or its political alignment. In some cases, these premium features are fairly niche. For example, CareerLabs has compiled an extensive amount of data about which companies sponsor the most work visas for overseas workers. "A number of companies say they will sponsor a visa, but a smaller group of firms actually actively sponsor visas," Van Horne says.

The idea of charging people money to find a job may be a tough sell. But Van Horne argues that even when times are tough, there are certain things that job seekers value in a potential employer. "Often people think they just want a job," he says. "But in the back of their mind they want an employer where they will be respected, where they will be happy."