Need Help Landing A Post-Grad Job? This Startup Says It Can Give You A 60% Shot At Scoring…

Andrew Myers can still recall the look on his mother’s face when he said he was dropping out of Yale University. While the rest of the junior class was applying for internships to jumpstart their careers, he was building a startup to help them get hired.

At the same time, his intramural soccer buddy and Yale senior Eric Ho turned down a $300,000 job offer from Facebook so they could cofound RippleMatch, an early career recruiting platform that connects employers with more diverse talent.

“It was just really crummy to see the way that, based off of your standardized test scores or who your college guidance counselor was, you were tracked on to different paths at age 18,” CEO Myers says. “It was just an area where you realize that technology could probably deliver way better outcomes for both employers and candidates.”

Five years later, the New York-based startup is helping more than one million early career job seekers find employment with company clients including Amazon, eBay, Pfzier and General Mills. On Tuesday, RippleMatch announced it had raised $23.5 million, bringing its total funding to $34 million at a valuation Myers says is nearly $100 million. Investors include Invus Partners, Renegade and Gaingels, among others. It also launched a new candidate relationship management tool to help employers track their hiring efforts and stay in touch with candidates.

College students can create profiles on RippleMatch for free. After they fill in details about their work history, values and motivations, RippleMatch uses artificial intelligence to scan students’ profiles and identify top candidates for internships and jobs posted by employers, who pay an annual subscription fee between $25,000 and $250,000. 

“With RippleMatch, you only get paired with jobs that you’re very likely to get an interview at and 60% of the time, you actually end up landing a first round interview,” says Myers, 27. “So candidates really trust the system.”

The average enterprise company typically forms relationships with five to 10 colleges’ career services offices, something that RippleMatch says often results in them inadvertently ignoring talent from large swaths of the country. Because RippleMatch users represent 1,300 schools—including more than 150 historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions—it says it allows employers to consider 50% more candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

“We’re thinking about shaking up the way that hiring has worked for generations.”

Jenn Prevoznik McNamara, global leader of early career talent attraction at SAP, a RippleMatch client, has seen this play out first-hand. “SAP’s daily usage of RippleMatch platform allows our team to succeed in a 100% virtual environment, reach more candidates and maximize candidate reach to diverse populations,” she said in a statement. “Their data analytics, event management platform and true partnership allow us to make strategic hiring decisions.”

This focus on diversity, coupled with its use of automation, is what sets RippleMatch apart from traditional job search giants like LinkedIn and Indeed, Myers says.

“We’re committed to making the job search process more intelligent, efficient, candidate-friendly and accessible for all job seekers. Increasing access to opportunity for candidates from underrepresented educational, racial, socio-economic backgrounds—that’s kind of the big picture vision,” Myers says. “We’re thinking about shaking up the way that hiring has worked for generations.”

Lauren Kalo, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, says she started using RippleMatch in August 2019 at a friend’s recommendation. It helped her secure an internship at Anheuser-Busch last summer, and an associate sales representative job at Dell when she graduates next month.

“UNC Greensboro is not necessarily a target school for a lot of corporations,” says Kalo. “I think RippleMatch played a lot into me getting those roles. I do give them a lot of credit.”