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.