Social Recruiting Helps Find Jobs for Grads

KODA.us, the social recruiting Website that is changing the way new talent and smart companies connect, just announced a new suite of tools to help colleges and universities connect their graduates with career opportunities. A half dozen schools, including University of Miami, Florida International University and Tulane University, have partnered with KODA and will be using the service during the fall recruiting season.

The new functionality allows career centers to present hundreds of companies and thousands of jobs to their advisees, representing many more employer-relationships than any single career center could independently forge.

“Based on the number of schools that have already expressed interest in joining, as well as the simplicity of the tool, we anticipate having 25 university partners within six months,” says Jeff Berger, co-founder and CEO of KODA.

The university profiles on KODA give career advisors the option to stay in touch with students after their initial face-to-face meetings. If desired, counselors can use KODA to advise students and alumni about their professional profiles, recommend job opportunities, and answer basic questions. KODA is also designed to help career centers market their students and alumni to a large, common pool of employers.

KODA.us launched on May 27, 2009 as the first platform dedicated to social recruiting, bringing the identity-sharing process of social media to a job recruiting site shared by talent and companies. “KODA is more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn, letting both sides of the hiring equation get to know each other,” notes Berger. “Using a job board is like searching for a needle in a haystack. KODA gives you more needles, less haystack.”

KODA allows students to present their professional identities as early as freshmen year and explore career options as they grow throughout college or grad school. The profiles focus on life experience, including community and campus involvement, enabling talent to highlight personal attributes and skills that they may have acquired through avenues other than formal employment.

Within the past four months, KODA has established relationships with over 400 employers, ranging from Fortune 500 and Inc. 5000 companies to small non-profits. Each employer fills out their own profile that digs deep into workplace culture, setting them apart from other companies and promoting their organizational brand to candidates.

“Gen-Y job seekers don’t often know what specific companies and opportunities to explore, and KODA provides a pipeline that makes these job seekers more informed,” explains Berger. “They’ll now have access to information about corporate culture before they even decide to apply for a position.” KODA’s proprietary crawler technology automatically integrates job postings from companies’ own Websites onto KODA.

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