Recruitment Platform Intern Avenue To Roll Out Across Europe With Vodafone

Intern Avenue is a startup which matches college undergraduates/graduates searching for paid internships with employers by using a data-based scoring system. To date, around 2,000 employers and 40,000 intern applicants have registered with the service in the UK. But it’s now secured a major distribution deal with Vodafone Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the telecoms giant, to expand the service across Europe.

Founder Dupsy Abiola, a former lawyer and Oxford graduate, has created a data-driven way for young people to get a foot on the jobs ladder and solved the headache of corporates having to scour through though thousands of applications.

Abiola told me that with Vodafone as a distribution platform, they are “planning to develop a unique and disruptive mobile solution”. She said Vodafone Foundation will “support us in a few ways. Initially the focus will be helping us to advance our technology, particularly optimizing in the mobile space and then helping us expand our reach.”

The partnership was announced at the Vodafone Institute’s Digitising Europe event in Berlin today, which featured a keynote speech from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel (pictured).

With Intern Avenue, the key point of differentiation from other market players (which are mainly advertising or agency based talent solutions) is that they are focused on automation and building a predictive profiling mechanism that helps match the most suitable candidates with the right employers. This is big data applied to recruitment.

In addition, the startup is raising a small funding round on Seedrs, which is on course to hit its target. It’s also secured a £250,000 UK government grant from the Technology Strategy Board. The company won Best Recruitment startup last year at The Europas Awards.

It’s high time more of this sort of thing happened, given the perilous state of youth unemployment in Europe.