Uptick

Inspiration

I was at home (India) last semester due to COVID and discovered that internship and new-grad recruiting there was broken. After talking to friends that study here and a VP of a local university, I found out that:

1) Almost all companies hire in-person at colleges and therefore are only able to reach and interview a limited number of candidates (at a high logistics cost). Small companies are hurt the most. COVID has made this already inefficient process almost impossible.

2) Colleges (career services) have no clue how to help students find jobs, bring in more companies, and can't track placements. They have to coordinate complicated in-person hiring drives and inform students about opportunities over WhatsApp (if at all).

3) Students suffer because they have a limited pool of companies to interview with, have to find opportunities themselves (internships especially), and during COVID these challenges have meant unemployment even at top colleges has skyrocketed.

Key insight: awareness about internships are growing REALLY FAST in India. Right now, most of my friends don't even think about internships or know how/where to apply for one. However, internship listings have grown 100x in the past 6 years (https://qz.com/india/1793105/indians-seeking-internships-increased-over-100-times-in-six-years/)

What it does

Students can now find and apply to their dream internships and jobs in just a few clicks.

Access to 200x more companies than a traditional, in-person career fair. Message recruiters directly and be notified when relevant jobs open up. Create an interactive personal portfolio to showcase projects and experience.

Employers can recruit virtually confidently, at 10% of the cost of in-person efforts.

Reach 2000x more students from 40K+ colleges per recruiting season. Message students directly and customize brand image to increase engagement. Powerful suite of virtual tools to power recruiting, all the way from hosting events and interviews to tests and tracking.

University Career Centers can finally influence and track student outcomes.

Powerful suite of tools to host events and communicate with students. Track student progress and increase student body engagement. Connect with 200x more employers directly and instantly.

What we've built

So far, we've conducted user interviews, performed market research and unit economic calculations, received a verbal agreement from a university, and designed high fidelity mockups and prototypes.

What's next for Uptick

We plan to use results from our interviews, research, and preliminary tests to run an MVP test with an employer to move their entire recruiting process to a virtual format. We hope to use this experiment as a way to gain more insight into the recruiting process and where we can capture (and monetize) the most value. Additionally, we plan to conduct user testing of our prototypes, and begin developing the backend of our platform so we're ready to built the front-end as soon as we have a direction to pursue.

Built With

• figma
• graphql
• node.js
• postgresql
• react