This Entrepreneur Made A Job Site That College Students Are Using Instead Of LinkedIn | Forbes

I started Handshake out of a personal pain that I face and witness many friends face, which is just like finding your first job is super intimidating. And if you don't have a family network or, you know, you've maybe worked one part-time job, which I had done before, like it's really intimidating to figure out where you fit in this world of work. And so I started Handshake to try to make it easier for any student, regardless of kind of what your parents do or what school you go to, to find a great opportunity and to try to democratize access to opportunity. My name's Garrett Lorde. I'm the CEO of Handshake. And Handshake's the number one place that young professionals are finding their first job. I started Handshake as a junior in college as a side project, trying to think about what we could do to make a platform that would make hiring more fair. We would basically like buy pizzas and work in a library with a bunch of my software development friends building features for students like myself, and based on talking to employers at career fairs and based on talking to our university career center, and then we'd go sit down with our career center and go sit down with employers and show them what we built and get feedback and iterate. Getting started wasn't very easy. If you think about it from like a student perspective, It's not about your past, it's about your future. So we're trying to help you understand what do other students do, what's trending at your college, what are other women who are studying engineering who want to go to New York pursuing.

When you're thinking about a student and them looking for their first job or their first internship, there's always a little bit of nervousness and anxiety. Students don't know what they don't know. And so there are a lot of questions, and sometimes they're not even sure what questions to ask. Um, they're looking for guidance, they're looking for tips, they're looking for a place where they can get more information so that they can make more informed choices. And since we partner with their university, universities, we're able to give them access to a career counselor or career advisor to actually help guide their steps along the way. And since we partner with all these employers, we're also able to provide them with lots of actual events and opportunities for them to meet directly with recruiters or directly with hiring managers who can give them the tips and tricks for how to stand out in the job search process.

So you can think about it as like an experience where you don't need to have luck, you don't need to have connections to be successful. From the employer perspective, employers can come on to recruit at any one of 1,400 higher education education institutions.

We're the largest early career talent network because we partner with over 1,400 universities and colleges. Uh, we help them connect over 18 million students and young alumni to over 650,000 employers on our network.

If you think about the way the world looked previously, it was actually very fragmented. So an employer had to have 35 different logins to recruit at 35 different schools, whereas with Handshake, they come to one platform to connect with any one of the talented students across the country. And then on the university side, what they ask us for is like software to help them engage more students. And help them manage their employer relationships and then report on this overall recruiting environment. We make money from universities and employers. So universities pay an upfront fee every single year to use the tool, and then employers can use the tool. There's a free version and a paid version, and the paid version employers can pay for generally is based on how many people are using the tool. Today we're hyper-focused in Europe and United States, but 5 years from now I think that means millions of folks that have started or jump-started, restarted their career attribute Handshake to the way that helped them get, land on their feet in a job they're proud of.