Early career marketplace for students and young grads - collegefeed

I think it’s quite strange when I find college grads on LinkedIn. A whole section of your profile has to be left incomplete, unless you add your experience at summer jobs. And the more you think about it, LinkedIn as a platform is not meant for college grads. Arguably, the most appealing thing about anyone’s LinkedIn profile is the professional experience section and the testimonials, which most students won’t have.

To tackle this problem, Google’s former product chief, Sanjeev Agrawal, created collegefeed, which acts like a personal career assistant to help students and new grads find their dream jobs. The platform aims to modernize the job-search process by leveraging the latest technology – social media, big data, real-time communications, etc. They claim that many students, universities and employers have already joined in the U.S.

The USP of collegefeed is a recommendation engine that maps your skills and companies that you’d like to work for, which you enter as a first user. Post this, collegefeed shows you jobs which would suit you in the companies that you’d work for. It also shows you similar jobs in other companies as well. Based on the entered data, collegefeed also shows you similar companies, to the ones that you’ve chosen.

Students from premier institutes, who are aware of the companies in the West, have found great use for the platform. collegefeed shared some testimonials with us, from students from BITS Pilani and IIT M -

"Collegefeed offers an incredible opportunity to ambitious international students to showcase their skills alongside some of the best in the world,” said Anjishnu Kumar, BITS Pilani. “The sheer potential of this platform gives me goosebumps. I can't wait to see what happens as it grows. This is an idea whose time has come."

“Thanks to Collegefeed, I can now connect with international students with quality startups and small companies – platforms that we would otherwise never come in contact with,” said Siddharth Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. “Coming into contact with such companies at an early stages of their life can really be a catalyst to starting your career.”

The company had earlier been in Beta and had tested it with the students of Berkeley University, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. In this time, the company also went on to raise a round of funding from various investors, including 1.8 million USD from Accel Partners. They have now opened the application to the rest of the world, along with a networking tool.

Founder Sanjeev Agrawal believes that the networking essential says, “With summer over, the newest crop of grads is out there right now trying to find a job. Nearly 50% will fail. Sure, networking is the #1 way to get hired – and LinkedIn is great once you already have professional experience – but where do college kids even start? We at collegefeed have introduced a new tool, that lets users quickly build a network of peers in their field from around the world, from Birmingham to Bangalore to Boston.”

Another interesting thing collegefeed is doing is called Idea Swag. Sanjeev says, “We envision a world with greater interaction between companies and college students. That’s where Idea Swag comes in. Companies can offset tuition expenses with cash prizes or let users compete for the hottest new gadgets like an iPhone 5c, X-mini UNO speakers or Jawbone via Collegefeed’s employer-sponsored awards.”

The questions are open-ended and thought-provoking. The company claims that the applicants don’t have to be a rocket scientist to enter and all they need are fun, original ideas. Through Idea Swag, employers get the opportunity to assess, identify and recruit the right talent before they graduate. And students get significantly better exposure to companies early. The first Idea Swag sponsored is by eBay.

The company makes its money through the jobs listings, but as a result, what we see with collegefeed is a great proposition for the Indian student who’s looking to work with all those aspirational companies, which are seemingly impossible to get into. At the same time, it exposes some very interesting companies to the students whom they would have otherwise have never heard of. The companies have a great proposition by getting in touch with a completely new set of students, who are just as adept as the candidate they hire through their existing channel.

It will be interesting to see how this spans out in India in the coming days.

Visit - collegefeed