It’s a tough job market out there for college job applicants, and students are looking for anything that can help them stand out from the crowd. While an increasing number of students look to apply to jobs online, the information that might give students a shot at improving their candidacy and landing a job isn’t something they want to share publicly, it’s confidential. As a result, most of this confidential information — whether it be recommendations from professors or expiring job offers — is shared offline.
James Ingallinera and Trey Griffith founded Endorse.me last year to give college jobseekers a secure, online platform through which they can share confidential information with prospective employers, and, in turn, give companies a better way to identify and hire top collegiate talent. Endorse.me is officially launching today at 17 campuses across the U.S., including Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, UVA, Berkeley and Brown, to name a few, with plans to expand to more colleges in the upcoming academic year.
The fundamental idea behind Endorse.me, Ingallinera tells us, came from his years of experience working in the financial sector. Today, with so many students and recent graduates struggling to find work — and the influx of job applications — the standard, one-page resume is no longer enough. It’s the same philosophy behind services like HireArt and many more.
Ingallinera says that, today, students are looking for ways to stand out in applying for their dream jobs, and to share the kind of information that carries more weight than the standard CV. To do this, students are asked to apply to Endorse.me and, once approved, they can add their resume, recommendations from professors and expiring job offers to their confidential profiles. Students can then create a list of their chosen employers and, after reaching out to professors for recommendations, they can choose the companies with which they share that information.
Endorse.me will then notify those companies of the student’s interest, giving them a complete list of all the students looking to apply to help get their profile information in front of hiring managers. Students can also update their job status on their profile to give employers of interest an opportunity to see interview and job offers they’re receiving — the idea being to allow them to unlock further opportunities once companies see that their competitors are interested.
In turn, students can upload their resume and list the firms they’re interested in, so that they are targeted by them throughout the coming year when new job opportunities arise, regardless of whether the company is actively recruiting at their college.
On the flip side, the more students it attracts, the more value Endorse.me thinks that it can have for employers. Hiring managers can use the platform to view the top-ranked students in their industry, according to their supervisors and professors, which Ingallinera says can be a stronger indicator of on-the-job performance than a one-page resume. By allowing students to express intent and share job offers, Endorse.me allows employers to see where students stand in the hiring process with their competitors, and gain access to and view profiles and resumes year-round.
At launch, the founders tell us, Endorse.me is targeting the financial and technology sectors specifically, but plans to expand its scope in the coming year. That means, at this point, hiring managers from companies like 10gen, Airbnb, Blackstone, Citi, Codecademy, Credit Suisse, Eventbrite, General Catalyst, HubSpot, Indiegogo, Mozilla, Pinterest, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Spotify, Twitter and Zaarly are currently on Endorse.me and looking for candidates.
Today, Endorse.me is available exclusively as a cloud-based online service, but over the summer, the startup plans to begin developing mobile apps, which it expects to have ready in the fall. The service is currently free for students, employers, and all those intermediaries who choose to write recommendations for students. Again, the service is currently free for employers, but as the startup looks to monetize down the road, it will eventually began charging employers for access to student info.
Endorse.me raised a small round of $300K in seed capital last year, and will look to begin raising its Series A later this fall.
For more, find Endorse.me at home here.
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