inDegree

This spring, a new website, www.indegree.com, came online to help graduate students achieve their dreams of finding better job opportunities. The brainchild of FSU MBA alumnus Alex Miningham (class ’08) and FSU Associate Professor Molly Wasko, inDegree is the first and only website that uses the power of professional networking to create an enterprise solution for graduate student placement and alumni services. By pioneering a 3-dimensional networking model, inDegree builds valuable relationships among three stakeholder groups: graduate students, employers and universities.

The inDegree founders set out to solve two important problems faced by most graduate programs. The first is graduate student placement. The key to effective placements is to aggregate graduate students from programs across the country into one centralized location so that employers can easily target them. Graduate students have a hard time differentiating themselves in the job market, and there are simply not enough graduate students at each university to support on-campus employer recruiting. Furthermore, current job seeking websites do not offer unique services for people with graduate degrees, resulting in tedious job searches and low content job prospects. “The launch of inDegree is incredibly timely as graduate students enter one of the toughest job markets in decades. Creating a niche professional network of highly educated workers not only helps graduate students find jobs, but provides an invaluable service to employers trying to identify the best talent”, says co-founder, Alex Miningham.

Through inDegree, graduate students and alumni will be able to build valuable professional networks, leverage connections with classmates and alumni, manage all job hunting activities from one central location, and use advanced matching capabilities to be alerted when dream jobs become available. Graduate students post interactive professional profiles to enhance their traditional resume by using multi-media tools, such as video, images, work samples, presentations and references. They can manage all aspects of the job search through the website: apply for jobs, manage their applications and RSVP to recruiting events. Employers can post jobs directly on the website. inDegree has also partnered with Indeed™, an internet job search engine, to make available over 500,000 job postings from across the web. The jobs posted on inDegree from Indeed™ are carefully filtered to ensure that job postings are relevant to people with graduate degrees. inDegree also provides advanced matching capabilities, notifying graduate students automatically about relevant job opportunities in order to streamline the job search process.

The second problem the founders set out to solve was how to improve graduate student alumni management. Graduate students can not easily leverage their alumni networks to enhance their career opportunities. Additionally, universities have a difficult time maintaining accurate contact information on graduate students once students graduate and enter the job market. Through inDegree, graduate students are automatically linked to classmates and alumni from their graduate programs, and can engage in direct communications with these students to seek out new career opportunities. Graduate students can search their personal connections and alumni networks along a variety of dimensions, including employment information, to identify potential links to job openings. Graduate students are motivated to maintain their profiles long after graduation to stay connected with each other and to keep abreast of new job opportunities as employers passively review professional profiles for potential recruits.

This creates a unique opportunity for universities to stay connected with their graduate students. By creating university and graduate program profiles, inDegree eliminates the need for graduate programs to create and maintain internal, centralized alumni data systems. Graduate programs can upload cur¬rent graduate student and alumni data directly into the inDegree database safely and se¬curely. Graduate programs benefit from real-time updates on all current graduate students and alumni as these users refresh their profiles. Universities have complete access to their graduate student data and will be able to run specific reports and queries through the website. Graduate programs can leverage the site to create stronger alumni communities by creating and marketing events, managing RSVP lists, sending out newsletters and communicating directly with current graduate students and alumni through the website.

inDegree is currently in beta testing with the FSU College of Business and will be available to all FSU graduate programs who would like to participate in mid-March. The site is scheduled to officially launch in April. In terms of future plans, as the site gains a critical mass of graduate student and university members, additional services will be offered such as: exit surveys, benchmarking studies and research opportunities. “We want this to be the premier site developed by and for graduate programs. In order to help fulfill the research mission of graduate programs, we want to be able to eventually leverage the site to create new and exciting research opportunities for graduate students and faculty”, says co-founder Molly Wasko.

For more information about inDegree, suggestions on new services, or if you are interested in participating in beta-testing, please contact Molly Wasko or Alex Miningham at info@indegree.com.