It’s an open secret that tal­ent­ed col­lege stu­dents con­tem­plat­ing media jobs when they grad­u­ate will be wooed by the big beasts in the tech jun­gle long before the ink is dry on their degree cer­tifi­cates. But what of small­er firms who haven’t got the big bucks and cam­pus mind­share of the Face­books and Googles of this world? Thanks to two Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan alums, Azarias Red­er and Lan­der Gar­cia, small­er com­pa­nies now have the means to start engag­ing col­lege tal­ent ear­ly, paving the way to future recruit­ment: meet Meritful.

Big com­pa­ny stu­dent engage­ment for the lit­tle guy

To go back to those big beasts for a moment: they invest a lot of time and resources into career fairs and infor­ma­tion ses­sions on cam­pus­es, dur­ing which they meet large num­bers of future prod­uct man­agers, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers, and so on.  But because earn­ing the qual­i­fi­ca­tions will take a few years, big com­pa­nies keep the tal­ent they’re inter­est­ed in in the pipeline for extend­ed peri­ods, main­tain­ing an inter­est in their progress and, essen­tial­ly, woo­ing them into work­ing for them later.

Mer­it­ful, inge­nious­ly, is build­ing a stu­dent-cen­tric CRM plat­form that does all this for the lit­tle guy – small­er recruiters, too, will be able to engage promis­ing tal­ent ear­ly in their careers, fol­low them through their cours­es and offer them jobs upon graduation.

Two-way exchanges through to graduation

Here’s how it works: upon sign­ing up at Mer­it­ful, a company’s recruit­ing team will be asked to select some of its employ­ees (engi­neers, prod­uct man­agers, busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciates, pro­gram­mers, etc.) to act as cam­pus ambas­sadors for the firm.  Once these com­pa­ny ambas­sadors show­case their firms at career fairs or meet promis­ing stu­dents through their stu­dent career pages, they invite the prod­uct man­agers and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers of tomor­row to con­nect with them on Meritful.

And that’s where the fun begins. Not only can the com­pa­nies keep an inter­est­ed eye on what projects their favored stu­dents are work­ing on and what suc­cess­es they’re notch­ing up (stu­dents can show­case all of this via Mer­it­ful), they can step up the engage­ment process by set­ting chal­lenges for them to solve in areas like design, pro­gram­ming, busi­ness or research, too. The stu­dents inter­act with he ambas­sadors as they work on these chal­lenges, who there­by build up a clear pic­ture over time of the bright­est talent.