“Handshake is the largest early career network helping over 8 million students jumpstart and launch their careers,” explains Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer of Handshake.
“We serve students all over the U.S. and the UK. We partner with over 1200 universities and colleges to help connect their students to over 550,000 employers on our network.”
She continues, “We have all types of employers from all different industries and all different sectors. We have a 100% of all the Fortune 500 companies on Handshake, but we also have mid-sized companies, local companies, mom and pop shops. Employers are able to find students from everywhere and students, in turn, are able to actually find employers regardless of what their interest is.”
Cruzvergara explains that the virtual nature of the platform allows students to build social capital and often land internships and first jobs.
The platform has opened up the hiring being done by Handshake’s employer partners, according to Cruzvergara. “We’ve been really fortunate in working with our employers, helping them to understand that by building a virtual strategy, they’re actually able to be school agnostic. They no longer need to just go to the schools that perhaps they went to, or their CEO or exec team went to, but rather they can recognize that talent is distributed evenly, even though opportunity isn’t.”
“What we’re really trying to solve is how do we democratize opportunity? How do we get those opportunities out to more students? And how do we help employers ultimately find better talent -because talent is not just concentrated at those few particular schools.”
Click here to learn more about Handshake.
WorkingNation – a collaborating partner of the ASU+GSV Summit—sat down with Cruzvergara in San Diego as part of our #WorkingNationOverheard social media series.
Hear from more innovators in education and tech in the public, private, and nonprofit spheres attending the ASU+GSV Summit 2021 here.
Follow the conversation on social media: #asugsvsummit #workingnationoverheard
© Copyright 2024 by Structural Unemployment, LLC dba WorkingNation
Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.
Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.
Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.
Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.
Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.
Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.