Announcing Our Investment in RippleMatch
Data-Driven University Recruiting
We are thrilled to announce our investment in RippleMatch’s $6M Series A with G20 Ventures and previous investors Accomplice, Bullpen Capital, and AlleyCorp.
This investment is particularly significant for me on a personal level: in addition to being an investor, I have also been a longtime GED educator, teaching adults for the past ten years.
I have seen countless students — bright, hardworking, hungry — unable to access opportunities because of where they were born or where they grew up, or simply lacking a network and connections.
While others may bemoan this reality, we’re instead thrilled to back a company that is actively working to flip this script to rewrite the future for generations of students: RippleMatch.
RippleMatch connects students with the right opportunities regardless of where they went to school and helps employers reach candidates from a wider range of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Their early career hiring platform enables companies to source from a curated pool of diverse, qualified candidates in less time and at lower cost than traditional collegiate recruiting programs.
RippleMatch has already connected thousands of students with career opportunities at great companies to which they may not have otherwise had access. As such, we could not be more excited to support RippleMatch’s vision and mission.
The Problem
A key component of our investing model at Work-Bench is hearing directly from Fortune 500 enterprises, including their challenges and problems they’re solving. As these and many other companies are drastically rethinking workforce development, rethinking the future of recruiting has become core to our Future of Work thesis.
The talent war remains competitive, with enterprise companies both large and small struggling to attract talent. Meanwhile, for students entering the workforce, determining where to begin their careers is a huge decision, and more often than not, they’re limited to beginning their searches at campus career services. Unlike mid-level or mid-career candidates, most students are not yet on LinkedIn, and even if they were, have few data points to share given limited job experience.
Thus, the status quo for university recruiting has remained largely unchanged, residing mostly on job boards, with thousands of jobs posted and resumes submitted. The volume for both students and their prospective employers is cumbersome and challenging to cut through — a painful, inefficient and not tech-enabled experience.
Many companies still rely largely on in-person campus visits and conferences: a time-consuming, manual, and expensive process. This results in low coverage of universities across the country, with most top enterprises still recruiting from a small number of core schools. This leaves out the vast majority of students, which hurts both candidate quality and diversity.
The RippleMatch Platform
The beauty of RippleMatch’s data-driven platform lies in its effectiveness: creating a marketplace of students and proactively matching them with a highly curated list of hiring companies.
RippleMatch’s platform collects detailed preference information on location, career path, and company culture from both candidates and employers. These preferences — comprised of over 300 proprietary data points — enable sophisticated matching via attributes that encourage job success and employee retention, while delivering on diversity goals across racial, gender, and socioeconomic lines. As a result, the platform helps surface roles for job seekers that they may not have otherwise considered, but that are a great match for their interest and skill-set.
Because RippleMatch’s platform is opt-in, curated students and vetted employers are far more likely to make a true connection during the interview process, leading to a significantly better user experience for both. RippleMatch is already working with enterprise customers like Pfizer, Palo Alto Networks, TripAdvisor, Qualtrics, and many others, having matched thousands of students with opportunities that otherwise likely would have remained unknown and inaccessible.
As a trusted platform for students to navigate their early careers, RippleMatch has the massive opportunity to own this early career space and transform the career experience for generations of students to come.
The Opportunity Ahead
We could not be more thrilled to support cofounders Andrew Myers and Eric Ho, who met at Yale University and saw the broken university campus recruiting process firsthand. We’ve been so impressed with their passion, execution, and above all, personal commitment to this greater mission and vision of connecting great talent with opportunity across the country.
When I think back on my own career, having previously worked at Cisco Systems, I may never have considered a job there if not for a serendipitous meeting. My time at Cisco is still one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had, with incredible leaders and managers who gave me responsibility, experiences, and resources. I advise many people early in their careers to work at a large company, even if for a few years. All that to say, there are great companies offering great careers to students — if only the two sides can better connect. I am excited to see RippleMatch unleash these opportunities for generations of students to come.
Join us in welcoming the RippleMatch team to the Work-Bench family!
Check out more press coverage in TechCrunch here.
