Today Austin, TX-based MyEdu, an online platform students use to plan and complete college, announced the launch of their new Student Profiles, as well as MyEdu for employers, which goes beyond just helping students chart their path to graduating from college and connects them with employers. Since launching its education management platform in 2010, MyEdu has attracted a user base of 5.3 million students with data from over 800 public colleges, and has raised $18.7 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Baylor Angel Networks, as well as strategic investment from the University of Texas System.
“The service is really built on top of a massive database of academic information. The company was created with the premise that we need to provide students with better access to all the data that helps them make better choices for their academic outcomes,” MyEdu’s SVP of Products and Marketing Frank Lyman said in an interview. “We help students get a better return on their education, and what that means is the civic, academic, and professional outcome of their education weighted against the investment that they make. And we believe that better data, and access to that data, helps students achieve that.”
The new tools, Student Profiles and MyEdu for employers, were the result of a series of discussions the company had with students and employers, who both expressed their frustration at the limitations of existing tools for post-grad talent matchmaking. For students, they have the choice to create a visual profile that showcases their professional and extra-curricular experience, course work and major assignments, and can interact with recruiters while searching for jobs and internships. For employers, they can start connecting with prospective candidates early on to build their brand awareness in addition to being able to filter student profiles by school, graduation year, major, courses and experiences. They can also post jobs and internships and have students reach out requesting mentorship and advise on what specific courses, experiences, and skills will help land them the job.
“We started talking to students and employers about what role we can play. One data point we talk about all the time is half of people aged 25 with an undergraduate degree are either unemployed or underemployed. And on the other hand, you have three million jobs, in every month since February, that are left unfilled, and you really get to see there’a s skills gap out there,” Lyman added.
MyEdu is free to use for students and colleges and charges employers a monthly subscription to help with their new graduate recruitment strategy, similar to LinkedIn’s pricing model for recruiters. It has so far had corporate pilot program members the likes of VMWare, Ernst & Young, and Macy’s.
There are no shortage of recruiting tools for companies looking to tap into the Gen Y workforce. Work4Labs, which recently closed $11 million in Series A funding for its Facebook recruiting platform, lets companies actively source and recruit on the social network as well as create a Facebook career page. Then there are companies like Identified that provide a professional network for millennials built around gamification and rewards, while others like PathTo connects its users to jobs based on an interest score aggregated from their online activity on Twitter and other popular networks in addition to how connected they are to the employer. However, where MyEdu strives to gain an edge is the additional academic and non-academic data that it believes truly powers its platform.
“When you talk to students about LinkedIn or other professional sites, they say ‘Yea, I’ve tried it, but it doesn’t tell my story well,’ LinkedIn works very well for someone like me who’s had a 20 year career, but it doesn’t show their work and passions that really tell a story for a younger professional,” Lyman added. “What makes us unique is that we’re doing it as part of a student’s academic journey.”
Lyman said the company recognizes that the same problems students face in the U.S are faced globally, and will be looking to bring its solution abroad over the next few months. Having already provided an academic platform that has helped millions of students navigate school, the company now has the ability to become a go-to platform for when it comes time for students to manage transitioning into working life, if it can win out over other recruiting solutions.
