New Collegefeed Service Matches Students with Employers
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 01/14/14
A Web company that that matches up college students seeking jobs and internships with potential employers has launched a new social network service specifically for the employers. Collegefeed was started by former Google Head of Product Marketing Sanjeev Agrawal. Since Collegefeed's formal introduction in August 2013 multiple universities and colleges, including Stanford, San Diego State, Cal Poly and Carnegie Mellon, have rolled out the service to their students to help them in their job hunts.
Now Collegefeed for Employers lets companies discover, attract, and connect with college talent. The service provides a free "basic" edition and a customized version. It works by allowing the employer to specify talent needs and preferences, such as the role being filled and the types of majors being sought. Then Collegefeed sends information about "hand curated" candidates to the employer subscriber inbox daily or weekly.
The company said in a statement that 500 companies had already signed on. On its site it claims that its "matching" algorithm is so relevant that three out of 10 candidates presented to hiring firms are selected for interviews.
Besides the matchmaking, the service allows hiring companies to create "brand" pages, run contests, host virtual events and reach out to potential candidates through other online social means.
"Stanford is currently building a career services model that's about connections between students, alumni, employers and the university community," said Farouk Dey, Stanford's associate vice provost and executive director of Career Services. "We have chosen to partner with Collegefeed because they offer the one product in today's market that gets this vision and truly optimizes students' branding and connections for a successful job search."
Added Laura Chambers, head of university programs at eBay, "We believe that our success is built by the brilliant minds and hard work of our employees — and that our future success will be built by the next generation of innovators and problem solvers. With tools like Collegefeed, we have the ability to quickly identify candidates who are looking for real-life post-graduation work experience and want to make a difference in the world and create more opportunity together."
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.