How young people will get jobs – with little work experience
NEW YORK (Reuters) – When student Danny Franklin started planning on jobs after graduation, his expectations wasn’t superb.
The 21-year-old accounting major at Delaware State had the typical work experience of a lot of young Americans: Not much of a whole lot.
Franklin's job history included stints at McDonald’s, Sears, and Sam’s Club – but nothing that is going to really grab the eye of a giant accounting firm.
No wonder Franklin's LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) page wouldn’t generate any job leads. Then his adviser in junior year told him about Handshake (joinhandshake.com), a jobs community for college kids and young alumni.
After monthly or a couple of building his Handshake profile, he was shocked: Companies were start to contact him, instead of the other way around.
“I was very surprised and overwhelmed,” says Franklin. “Companies were telling me about internships, professional development events and alluring me to work with to these items.”
Among the big-name firms that had a talk were consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, in addition to a couple of the country’s largest accounting concerns, Deloitte and PwC.
Franklin ended up accepting a position with prominent investment managers Capital Group, rolling around in its Norfolk, Virginia. offices. They’re slated to begin a full-time position there from the fall, after his graduation this spring.
CULTIVATING EXPERIENCE
Franklin were solve a difficult puzzle young grads encounter when entering the workforce. Just how do you obtain that the first with your chosen field, when you don’t have any experience yet?
“LinkedIn is far more of a mid-career tool, while you currently have work experience along with your professional network is made,” says Garrett Lord, Handshake’s CEO and co-founder. “But all students don’t possess which actually work experience yet and can even if it’s just really know what they gotta have. That’s where Handshake shines.”
After all, it’s difficult for teenagers to obtain with that first rung of the corporate ladder, even in a fashionable economy. In fact, 41.4 percent of the latest grads are viewed as “underemployed,” or building lower-level gig that didn’t call for a degree, based on an investigation by way of the Fed Bank of New York.
It is definitely an easier leap to make for students at big-name universities – like, say, Harvard or Yale – since Fortune 500 companies will physically arrived at their campuses and job fairs and actively recruit. Nevertheless for students at smaller colleges that may not be on recruiters’ radars, like Danny Franklin at Delaware State, how will they be designed to start life?
It became a familiar problem for Garrett Lord, himself a graduate of Michigan Tech, which has been not the earliest stop over the trail for Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) or Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) recruiters. This is the reason he and his co-founders started Handshake, for making something comparable to LinkedIn, but centered on college kids and young grads throughout the country in addition to individuals the Ivy League.
Handshake’s numbers so far are impressive: 14 million college students and young alumni, above 700 colleges in its network, 900,000 recruiters – and, notably, One hundred percent in the Fortune 500.
It has obviously caught the eye of serious Silicon Valley movers, with backers such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (yes, that Zuckerberg), the Omidyar Network (that’s Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY)), venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and a lot more.
It is undoubtedly a lot cover anything from the institution jobs offices of yore. Individuals associated with a certain age remember dusty and disorganized operations, with harried supervisors, cluttered desks and index cards of random job offers tacked up on corkboards.
Of course, students do not really must choose between career apps. They’re able to leverage all of them and grow their possibilities of getting HR managers' attention.
When Danny Franklin created a striking 3.5 GPA, joined his school’s accounting club and hang up some volunteer assist Habitat for Humanity, he uploaded it all – and, apparently, it cleared.
“Without that profile, I might probably still be trying to get jobs.”