Featured Startup Pitch: Jozii seeks to match employers in more effective ways with college students and recent graduates

By AJ Smith, Jozii co-founder and CEO

ELEVATOR PITCH

Jozii, a .edu-exclusive college jobs matching service and a source for matching students and employers, by providing an easy-to-use platform for both the student and employer to find the right fit.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Jozii is an online platform connecting students, recent alums and employers. The service is cost efficient for employers, increasing the likelihood for them to post internships, part-time, and full-time positions. By creating a .edu exclusive membership service, Jozii seeks to transform the college job market, making it simple for students to find jobs and employers to find student workers.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

I met Brandon in my sophomore year at NYU. Our friendship initially started out of our shared passion for songwriting, and we quickly became inseparable in both our social and professional lives. Since I have a pretty extensive tech background (serving as an optical engineer and programming analyst for the U.S. Navy, software developer for V_Systems, Inc., QA member at VeriSign, etc.), when Brandon was working a finance position at a bitcoin company, he recommended me to their web design team. I was brought on to revitalize their UX design, and Brandon and I ended up working there together. While the CEO of that company was effectively running it into the ground, Brandon and I left to form our own company and the concept behind Jozii was born.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

Jozii uses a combination of online and offline marketing to tackle the challenge of building a two-sided platform. Our marketing strategy creates brand awareness and generates student users through social media marketing, blogging and free programming (professional head shots, resume workshops, and online job profile improvement seminars) that we provide to universities and student groups. Jozii reaches out to employers who we feel would benefit most from having students as employees, increasing the chances that they will list their job or internship on our platform.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

The online job search market is a multi-billion dollar industry. Although some similar competitors have come about, no one has truly taken the college job market by storm. Jozii aims to fix this problem by featuring employers who are actively seeking college students, increasing the chances of success on both ends.

The Jozii founders.

WHAT MAKES US UNIQUE

There are several differentiating factors between Jozii and our competition. In terms of the well-known, larger job sites, we are a less expensive alternative that is .edu exclusive, meaning that our applicant pool consists primarily of college students (all levels, not just undergraduate) and recent alums. Talented students are finding it harder to break into full-time paid positions out of college when they are overlooked due to a lack of relevant work experience. Jozii aims to help fix this problem in several ways:

First, by staying .edu exclusive, our students aren’t up against competitive job seekers with five-plus years of post graduate experience. To help employers recognize not only the benefits of hiring college students and alumni, but also the benefit of using Jozii to do so, we have free comprehensive applicant analysis tools for employers and recruiters alike. These advanced tools help employers sort their applicants’ work/education experience, video introductions and more. Employers who may be multiple business owners or have multiple clients with hiring needs can even track their various companies’ hiring needs from a single portal and share permissions for each company individually, should they desire.

For students, we made Jozii as easy as possible as well. There are no hoops to jump through, but rather the easy, single-click application process. We are also targeting companies with needs of current students so that we can bring more current students internships and part-time jobs while they are in school, so that upon graduation their resume isn’t merely a name and a GPA. As such, part of our outreach is in working directly with schools through resume workshops, mock interviews, and more to better educate students on the value of having an internship or part-time job pre-graduation when it comes to job hunting with diploma in hand.

Perhaps our biggest impact though, is our compatibility-based job matching (set for public release later this year) which provides two match percentages. One is calculated based on how qualified a student is predicted to be for a position and the other is how well of a fit a student is into a company’s culture. We’re tackling job-matching like dating sites have done romance because even the larger corporations will admit that personality and culture fit of employees at a company or in teams are directly related to turnover rates. In other words, we want to help students find jobs that they will actually love, where they can be passionate about what they’re working on instead of watching the clock tick while longing for the weekend.

BUSINESS MODEL

Jozii is a completely free service for both students and even businesses looking to post jobs. Jozii allows a business to post up to three free job posts at a time, which are active for 30 days and can be viewed by students from any school. Jozii also offers a low cost placement service. For $149, Jozii eliminates all the hassle, manages the employer’s job post, pre-screens candidates, and sends three qualified students to interview with the prospective employer.

CURRENT NEEDS

We are looking to raise $2-to-5 million in VC money with our next round of investment for further expansion across the states and to make a very big marketing push.

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HEADQUARTERS: New York City