At WayUp, the largest marketplace for college student to find jobs, we constantly show employers the value of hiring young professionals, using our own site to hire college students: from sales and marketing interns to graphic designers and photographers. Here are just some of the incredible ways these students, without even a year of experience under their belt, have made a difference in our company.
1. Changing our name from Campus Job to WayUp
Campus Job was a name that was perfect for us in the early days of our business, but as we began to expand to all types of jobs, including entry-level opportunities, we knew the name was limiting and confusing; it failed to encompass the wide variety of job-seeking students and recent grads we wanted to target. After almost a year of wanting to change our name and struggling to settle on the right one, our self-starter interns, Hannah and Jess, two upperclassmen at Cornell, locked themselves in our office conference room for hours and finally came out with our new name “WayUp.” It was the perfect rebrand that described not only the diversity of opportunities on WayUp, but also what we hoped to accomplish as a business: helping students find a way to keep rising and achieving in their professional lives. The rebrand was one of our biggest moments last year and led to features in Forbes and TechCrunch.
2. Our logo
Molly O’Shea, a sophomore at NYU, created the blue paper plane that is now associated with our business and served as the perfect symbol to get our message across: helping students find their way up.
We were so happy with Molly’s work that we asked for an encore: a few months later, she helped us to design the subway ads that were displayed in every train in NYC.
3. The Campus rep program
Having accounted for over 50% of our user growth, our hard-working campus reps leverage their peer-to-peer network and satisfy an active need: getting college students jobs. They have done everything from writing about WayUp in their student newspapers to promoting our brand on social media to scheduling signup-driven competitions on campus — even sending over the incredible opportunities on our site to potential users. They are the eyes and ears on their campuses and they help us to reach more students than we ever could on our own.
The most important way that students have helped our business? Proving our business model right. In between rigorous classwork and demanding extracurriculars, our students hustle to find opportunities that will help them to gain experience and pay off their tuition — and they use WayUp to do it. It’s inspiring knowing that 1 in 3 students who apply for a job on our site get hired, and if it weren’t for their ambition and drive, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
From hiring graphic designers for social media ads to hiring students to analyze data about your business, if you’re looking to hire qualified students for your business, post a listing on WayUp. You’ll be surprised just how much your business benefits from incredibly talented college students.
