View from
The Center

This Yale Startup is Changing the Job Recruitment Game

Image via NYT.com

Job-matching sites Internships.com and WayUp have a new competitor.

Every modern college student knows of the plethora of internship and job-matching services available to help them to land the vaunted early career opportunity. Today, landing a mere interview in competitive fields like consulting and finance can be a nightmarish ordeal, so online services like Internships.com and Indeed.com have seen a spike in popularity in recent years.

Most students hoping to land an interview know that as a whole, these websites usually don’t deliver. Myself included: despite using a number of these platforms during my sophomore and junior years in college, not one helped me get an interview with a single firm in any industry.

Earlier this year, when I heard about yet another new company—RippleMatch—with the dubious promise of helping me land an interview, I rolled my eyes. But since this startup had received nearly two million dollars in venture capital funding, I decided to give it a try, just as an experiment.

About a month after uploading my resume, I received an email from a Ripple employee who told me that I have an interview with a Managing Director at a $6 billion private equity firm. I was stunned. For the unfamiliar, getting such an opportunity is reserved for 4.0 students from Harvard, or if their uncle owns the firm.

RippleMatch was launched out of Yale University by roommates Andrew Myers and Eric Ho in 2015. Merion West reached out to Andrew and asked him to share some insight behind Ripple’s success.

Image via YaleDailyNews.com

On founding the job-matching start-up:

“We started out by looking at the way the smaller firms, startups and nonprofits were recruiting. They were only recruiting through job postings, which honestly is a terrible way to draw somebody into your company,” he explains.

The 22-year old CEO emphasizes his company’s ability to streamline the process for companies that are hiring:

“The whole genesis of the idea was to allow employers to pinpoint great students and build relationships with them without actually having to set foot on a college campus.”

On why Ripple is superior to the existing alternatives:

“We create the best matches possible. There’s so many Indeeds and WayUps out there,” he explains, “so what we have prioritized from the very beginning is making candidate matches very effective for our employers.”

This matching process, the bread and butter of recruitment agencies, has traditionally been performed by humans, a costly and slow process. When asked about the secret sauce behind the efficacy of Ripple’s matching system, Andrew credits their shrewd use of data and computer science:

“We have built out powerful predictive algorithms that match students to particular roles and job descriptions. This ensures students are a true match for a role before recruiters ever see their resume.”

Andrew is not shy about recounting Ripple’s success, listing off names of firms from Silicon Valley start-ups to multinationals like BlackRock who are signing up to use the platform.

“For big companies I think this will be a great way to reach candidates they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach. This is so much cheaper than what they would have to pay for a traditional recruiting agency.”

As of the time of writing, RippleMatch only accepts students from the eight Ivy League universities, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Berkeley to use its platform. Following in the footsteps of an older Ivy startup founder, Andrew is planning to expand its pool of universities. He says that 30 other schools will be added soon.

Bottom line: From my view, there’s hope on the horizon in the stale field of job-matching services. If you are a college student looking to “break in” to an internship or full-time job, you have been gifted with another tool to use in your arsenal.

Editor’s Note: The original name “Ripple Recruiting” was changed to “RippleMatch” to reflect the company’s new name.

Henri Mattila is the publisher at Merion West. He was born in Helsinki, Finland and is an army reservist there. His professional experience is in pharmaceuticals and finance. After growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs, Henri attended Cornell University where he studied applied economics. Contact Henri at henri@merionwest.com.

5 thoughts on “This Yale Startup is Changing the Job Recruitment Game

  1. Hey! Quick question that’s entirely off topic. Do you know how to make your
    site mobile friendly? My site looks weird
    when browsing from my apple iphone. I’m trying to find a theme or plugin that might be able to fix this problem.
    If you have any suggestions, please share. Thanks!

  2. Der Daily Mirror zitierte die Sunday Times mit den Worten, Aubameyang wolle Arsenal wegen der Bewunderung seines
    Vaters für Arsene Wenger beitreten.

    Alba Meyhans Vater, Pierre-François, soll auch Yaya heißen –
    sehr bewundert Wenger. In den 80er und 90er Jahren spielte er in Frankreich und spielte für
    Laval, Le Havre und Toulouse, die 80 Mal die Nationalmannschaft von Gabun vertraten.

    Yaya ist jetzt AC Milan Scout, einige seiner anderen Söhne waren vor dem Training in Mailand, Ao Bomeyang
    kommt vom Jugendtraining in Mailand.

    Es scheint jedoch noch ein weiter Weg zu sein, um Asiens Traum zu verwirklichen. Zörth, der Geschäftsführer von Dortmund, sagte, der
    Verein werde nur Leute entlassen, wenn Arsenal ihre Bedingungen erfüllt.
    Arsenal sagte angeblich 50 Millionen Pfund, aber mehr spezielle Preisvorstellung
    60 Millionen Pfund. Arsenals Delegation befindet sich
    in Gesprächen in Deutschland, nachdem sie sich mit Aubameyang geeinigt haben. Sein wöchentliches Gehalt soll fast 200.000 Pfund
    betragen haben.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.