Garrett Lord, co-founder of Handshake, built a platform to connect students from any college with employers, not just elite schools. The platform now has 650,000 companies recruiting through it across 1,400 higher-education institutions. Lord points out that 43% of recent graduates are unemployed, arguing talent is everywhere but opportunity isn't.
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My name's Garrett Lorde, one of the founders of Handshake, and I'm an innovator. Handshake's mission is to help anyone start, jumpstart, or restart their career. We're really on a mission to democratize access to opportunity and help anyone build the foundations of a meaningful career. What's super exciting about Handshake is having, you know, 650,000 companies that are actively recruiting and changing their recruiting patterns and practices from just recruiting at 18 of the name-brand schools nearby their corporate HQ to actually finding talented students everywhere across the country. I started Handshake out of a personal pain that I faced and witnessed many friends face in college around navigating your way from college to career. And I started talking to my friends, I was like, maybe we start a business to make it easier for people like us to try to find internships and jobs. And we started traveling around visiting different universities and we built these friendships with career center directors. We would like sneak into career fairs of other, other campuses to talk to other students and talk to employers. And we just really started to put together the dots that this problem was only more real at other campuses. 43% of college students in America are graduating unemployed. Today, Handshake powers 1,400 higher education institutions across the country. We power hundreds of community colleges, boot camps, and skill-building programs. The business of helping people be successful in their career is actually extraordinary. Handshake is like so much about your future, and a lot of the existing networks are about your past. When you don't have work experience, it's really hard to get inspired around what the opportunities are for for you. We have companies that use this network, like General Motors, for example, who were able to find students at 750 universities, not just the 18 schools they used to recruit at. That's really beautiful. I mean, companies believe nowadays that talent is evenly distributed. Talent's everywhere. But what is not available in America is opportunity everywhere. That's where a nationwide network like Handshake is making a big dent.
