RippleMatch Platform Improves Early Career Hiring Process

By Joe Connolly and Neil A. Carousso

NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — RippleMatch helps college students and recent graduates launch their careers while improving employee retention rates by using data to find the best fit.

“If you’ve ever had the experience of applying for a job, it’s often that you throw your resume into a black hole and just sort of hope that someone maybe gets back to you,” said RippleMatch founder and CEO Andrew Myers on the WCBS Small Business Spotlight, sponsored by Dime Community Bank.

“With RippleMatch, you know, we only present opportunities on the platform when a candidate’s very likely to be a good fit. They generally hear back really, really quickly. They always get an answer,” he said.

Myers said that 66 percent of candidates on RippleMatch have gotten called for an interview.

He founded the company in 2015 in his dorm room at Yale University after feeling dejected when he only got three or four job interviews out of 55 applications. Calling the process “overwhelming” and “daunting,” Myers sought a better way for his peers using data predictive analytics to match early career candidates with jobs where they are most likely to succeed.

“Our mission (is) to replace job boards,” he said.

RippleMatch is free for candidates. It earns all its revenue from employers that now include Amazon, eBay, and Ernst & Young.

“One of the deals we make with every company that we work with is they commit to certain standards in terms of candidate experience and how they’re going to get back to candidates, and very typically prioritize the RippleMatch candidates that they’re getting matched with in terms of getting them into the interview process,” said Myers. “We just establish workflows on the back end that sort of get candidates into the company as fast as we possibly can, which is generally an advantage when it comes to candidate experience.”

He said retention rates among Gen Z employees that used RippleMatch are much higher as a result.

“The single thing (Gen Z employees) want most is professional development,” Myers said, continuing, “Within our own Gen Z workforce, we’ve seen really good retention within roles and I know a lot of our stronger companies have as well. So I actually think that good professional development with Gen Z employees can actually be a pretty effective strategy even in the heart of the Great Resignation. And, I think that there’s actually more shifting going on in sort of later stage positions than there are with Gen Z compared to millennials who are already pretty jumpy themselves. There’s not like a big Gen Z jump or anything like that that we’re seeing.”

He said RippleMatch has upended the belief that the best talent comes from prestigious universities and it has the data to support it.

“If you’re clinging to the notion that a candidate had to go to Princeton or you’re over attached to degree pedigree, I think it can actually mean you miss out on phenomenal talent,” said Myers.

See how RippleMatch works for both job candidates and employers on the WCBS Small Business Spotlight video above.