FresHires: A self branding platform

About this project

Introduction

My name is Yinka. I am an Entrepreneur, Petro-Chemical Process Engineer and Business Analyst. I am passionate about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics as well as the career development of the rising young professional. I have created the FresHires platform to help other rising young professionals who are going through a very tough time finding the perfect opportunity for their internships, part time or full-time jobs after college graduation.

My Motivation

The FresHires project was launched based on my personal experience. Having studied in the United States, England and Nigeria with 2 Master’s degrees (Petroleum Engineering from the UK and Chemical Engineering in the USA), I still could not get hired. Most companies would not even extend the opportunity to showcase the skills or experience I’ve had over the years either from the college environment or an internship. During this period, I was really disturbed and depressed. I started thinking more of being a solution than being part of the problem that arises from unemployment among rising young professionals.

While I was waiting for the ‘perfect’ opportunity, I worked as a call center agent being paid about $8/hr for few months before the call center was shut down. This heightened my frustration as an Engineering graduate. I actually wrote to some Human resources department of different companies asking work in an unpaid volunteer position. Sadly, no one would oblige. I decided to travel down to Houston TX (the oil and gas city) to find a job. I interviewed with some companies, most of these companies would not send a response to explain the outcome of the interview. I called in severally and would be told not to contact them again, as they would send me a notification once decision was made. Up until this moment, I have not received a response. I spoke to a lot of people trying to find a job to know more about their personal experience and strangely, they were very similar to mine.

The Turning Point

At that moment, I decided something needed to be done to help people like me who were going through the same experience (Graduated College and no one would hire you either as an intern, volunteer or full-time position). I got a job in Houston in a large apparel, hunting and fishing store, unloading trucks and stocking shelves. Honestly, I would relish an opportunity to work for any engineering firm even if I would be paid the same rate I was being paid for stocking up footwear on shelves.

I called up my friend -Oluseye Fadiran, whom I've known for 14 years (now FresHires Co-founder) to share the FresHires idea with him knowing that he had been in a similar predicament a few years earlier. We decided to put our hearts to work and create a platform to change the face of hiring of college students, university students, fresh graduates with little or no work experience as well as professionals with some experience looking to change jobs.

Companies hire not solely based on work experience but also because of GREAT SKILLS. Great skills that proffer solutions to company needs exemplify our self-brand and this is exactly what FresHires is all about.

What we Provide

Self Branded Portfolio: We provide an online skills portfolio with Video resume,visual evidence (videos, pictures and documents) of skills acquired and projects worked on campus. We provide chat lobby, chat rooms for group discussions and informative interactions, which is built with file transfer, file sharing, screen sharing, whiteboard sharing, voice & video chat functionality to promote research collaboration from different parts of the world.

In a world of constant change, there is a need to build the future by leveraging on the potentiality of the present generation. It is paramount to equip college/university students, fresh graduates and those with little or no work experience with necessary tools to succeed in their academic and post-academic endeavors.

A socio-academic & socio-professional networking environment: Most rising young professionals spend a lot of unproductive hours online in an environment that does not support their personal or career development. Most of these environments do not empower them with meaningful relationships that could be of positive impact.

We believe in the power of visuals. This is why we have created an online portfolio section where they can archive their college achievements, conferences, presentations and academic milestones in videos, pictures and documents. Hence, our users can showcase their unique skills and self-brand themselves to future employers. This will allow for students and graduates to evaluate their readiness for the workplace environment.

Networking & Collaboration with Experienced Professionals.

We believe that our rising young professionals should maximize their moments online i.e enjoy the social media networking environment and at the same time stay focused on building their individual brands towards an effective career development.

Job-Matchmaking

Through the jobseeker-recruiter matchmaking functionality on freshires, recruiters can build confidence in student’s employability while in college. This relationship building will support informed hiring decisions and help in minimizing hiring costs

We do understand that young people enjoy social interactions online and we are absolutely challenging them to develop meaningful relationships with our experienced professionals. Our social-academic environment promotes educator's (e.g. instructors, professors, college administrators) endorsement on their student portfolio. Educators also utilize the platform for collaboration,training and lecturing on the web using the chat platform. Mentors are also available for mentorship. We also have amazing life coaching, career coaching , counseling community.

Promote Volunteer Job Opportunities

We want to promote volunteer job opportunities for students and recent graduates with little or no work experience. We sincerely hope that small and mid size business owners will rise to this occasion and assist us in making our world a better place for college students, university students and graduates. Our users can utilize our volunteer job search engine as soon as they are signed in to the website.

Volunteer JobsVolunteer Jobs

They can also apply to the regular jobs using our search engine and the organic FresHires career center.

JobsJobs

Why Do We Need Investors?

We have developed our awesome version one website and mobile apps (IOS/ANDROID) already. We are now faced with the challenges of getting the product out into the market.

1. Product Sales & Marketing

2.. Product Development and Scaling

3. The need to hire College & University Brand Ambassadors

4. Organizing Events. e.g. Campus events and Webinars

5. Massive Social Media Campaigns.

6. Advertisement

7. Development of collaborative tools to promote entrepreneurship among college students and university students as well as the fresh graduates.

8. Translate the platform into Spanish,French, Chinese and Hindi

Check out these images from our mobile app.

Mobile App PortfolioMobile App Portfolio

Job Search AppJob Search App

Our strategy/approach:

To work directly with college/university career center to help with campaigning FresHires to both students and alumni community by participating in career fairs. We plan to give internship and paid employment opportunities to current college students who would serve as college ambassador for FresHires in their respective schools. These FresHires ambassadors would serve as point of contact and provide information and assistance to other students who are seeking to know about FresHires and also require support to use the platform. The ideal FresHires ambassadors would be a student who is interested in technology, meeting people, and helping people use technology to achieve something of value. We would pay our ambassadors from the funds that we raise. We hope to be able to hire students from different colleges and universities and provide them valuable work experience that would come in handy on their FresHires Academic Portfolio and Personal Resumes.

Risks and challenges

We have been bootstrapping this project since June 2013. Inadequate resources and funding have hindered us from being able to deliver this project as fast as we wanted. Despite the fact, that we have been running this project by the two of us for a very long time, we have built two prototype versions of this website and now we are almost perfecting the version 1.0 of the main website and that of the mobile app which we will like to make available for free downloads in Google and iTunes Stores soon.

We desire to reach over 22 Million college and university students in the United States of America and this can only be achieved through adequate resources. Our goal is to hire college students on-campus to work for the FresHires Corporation as brand ambassadors, We believe the opportunity to work for our company will be a great step forward in helping these rising young professionals gain work experience.

We still have about 5 new features to add to our web and app products that will immensely impact the FresHires online community of students, graduates, recruiters,life coaches, career coaches, educators, counselors, and companies. We can not add these features yet due to inadequate funds.

Please I would appreciate your feedback and a one -on-one opportunity to tell you more about the vision as we are ready to GO LIVE and make impact globally.

Hoping to read from you soon.

Regards,

Yinka