Over the past several years as the entry level white collar job market has become more and more competitive, job placement has become increasingly more difficult. Unfortunately, new graduate job placement has become a crucial issue in recent years. In the last few years since the great recession over half of graduates were unable to find full-time jobs. Instead, they were forced to work low-income jobs such as waiters, baristas, unpaid interns and multi-level marketers.
In response to this crisis, a St. Louis based organization called Better Weekdays has answered the call to help job placement efforts for recent college graduates. Better Weekdays has a mission to utilize technology to help place employees at companies based on compatibility. Its technology enables career services offices and job placement sites much more effective by creating customized job sets for individuals.
The system works by first getting the students field of study, background information, resume, job experiences, activities and interests. It then analyzes over 1 million active job leads and helps to personalize the list for each student. The system is available on both desktop and mobile platforms. Not only that, but it is free for a limited time.
In addition, the system creates automated follow-ups and tracking as well as outcome measurement. These tools are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of career services. Better Weekdays is one of the only independent services that analyzes career options and actively tracks results.
Better Weekday Co-Founder & CEO Chris Motley's inspiring story help spur the development of the organization. Chris was born to a 13 year old mother on the south side of Chicago. Although he started in difficult circumstances, he made his way to Columbia University for college. After graduation he worked as a derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs before receiving his MBA at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University. From there, he worked at 1888 Mills for six years, leading their expansion into Ghana.
However, Chris Motley wanted to start his own organization, and help others in the process. He teamed up with co-founder Kunal Parbadia, who became VP of Operations and helped to build the career analysis system.
The company is growing rapidly and has already raised a total of $1.7 million to expand its operations. It was named as one of the companies in President Obama's TechHire Initiative and also received public funds from Arch Grants and the Missouri Technology Corporation. The firm has a senior leadership team with years of experience in successful execution. In addition, Better Weekdays has a board of directors with some of the leading visionaries in the tech and human capital spaces. These include Travis Sheridan from Venture Cafe as well as Bryan Garcia and John Williamson who were previously in high level positions at Equifax.
The organization was inspired by the Founder Institute, an organization that inspires and mentors some of the world's leading technology start-ups. In fact, Chris Motley is a graduate of the Chicago Founder Institute.
The Founder Institute is one of the premier start-up launch programs in the world, with dozens of locations all around the world and a Silicon Valley headquarters. It also employs a unique shared equity pool model where the equity that start-ups provide in return for shares is split evenly among partners and are also used to help continue to fund the program itself.
Overall, Better Weekends continues to improve, serving students not only in the St. Louis area but increasingly in other parts of the country as well. Better Weekdays is improving the job placement experience and helping solve the crisis of opportunity for recent graduates.
Follow on Twitter @BetterWeekdays or visit on Facebook at Better Weekdays to find out more.
