For better or worse, Toronto seems to get all the good stuff: career opportunities with big companies, investment money and publicity.
And Oakville? Oakville gets the short end of the stick.
Leaving their hometowns behind, its brightest, young graduates flock to the city lights. Oakville is suffering from a severe brain drain.
Also Graduates put themselves at a disadvantage. The Toronto job market is intensely competitive. Capable students often end up underemployed, instead of working in roles closer to home and perfectly valid in terms of career opportunities.
That’s exactly the situation that Charles Javelona, co-founder of UnivJobs, fixed.
A career opportunity
Charles is a senior enrolled at Sheridan College's Software Development & Network Engineering program. While most of his peers focused solely on passing their courses and searching for full-time employment, Charles decided to take a different tack and explore business opportunities that would help himself and Oakville.
Charles spoke to Victoria Stasiuk, Oakville’s Senior Economic Development Officer, about what problems the city needed solved. Victoria’s answer was simple: retaining talent. Oakville’s schools are producing intelligent, hard-working young professionals, but losing them to places like Toronto and Waterloo.
Charles immediately saw a way he and his partners could help.
Streamlined job applications
Charles and his team built a platform that helps local students find their first jobs. But the difference between Univjobs and other similar job search platforms is that it focuses on connecting graduates with local opportunities.
Univjobs fosters relationships between graduates and nearby businesses, before the urge to leave for “greener pastures” sets in. Students could stay close to home, and businesses could fill in the employment gap. Everybody wins!
The Univjobs platform streamlines the hiring process for both companies and students alike. For students, Univjobs limits users to one resume: their user profile. This simplifies the setup process while helping applicants stay focused on getting one resume as perfect as it can be. Then, an algorithm uses their industry skills and experience to match them to jobs best suited for their current situation (although students can manually search for jobs as well).
Perhaps, the most valuable feature is status notifications. In Univjobs, applicants can monitor the status of applications, so that they know when they’re still being considered and what stage their application is in. No more uncertainty!
Univjobs first made its debut at Silicon Halton, a community of tech entrepreneurs. The platform was presented to an audience of seasoned technology and business entrepreneurs, who provided positive and constructive feedback. By addressing some of the community’s comments, Charles and the team were able to get Univjobs to a stage where they were comfortable bringing in some preliminary companies and students from Sheridan College and Brock University.
Ramping up Univjobs
Charles and the team knew they were onto something almost immediately after the public beta began. Their first successful placement, Jessie Liu landed a student job at the Mexican restaurant Habanero with virtually no trouble. Jessie still works at the same job and Habanero is still using the app to recruit new employees.
“Univjobs had great tools for job search,” Jessie said. “I was called in for an interview the day after I applied.”
By using a combination of warm networking and word of mouth, Univjobs was able to quickly grow a dedicated following of university students and sign up a number of companies like Chartwells, Paladion-Cyber Security and ScribbleLive.
“Univjobs is a great platform for both students and employees to connect and share job opportunities from a wide range of Ontario universities,” says Courtney Cloudt, HR Generalist for Paladion-Cyber Security. “What makes Univjobs so great is that all your job postings are all in one place, saving employers time from having to check multiple job boards. The platform is intuitive--things are exactly where you’d expect them to be and it’s easy to navigate. Univjobs has also integrated a student profile search function that allows employers to actively search for passive candidates who might not be looking but are the perfect fit for a role.”
The path forward
When asked about potential next steps, Charles said, “We currently have plans on expanding the service to cover UTM and maybe Wilfrid Laurier University. We are also considering grant applications to help with our funding, but our primary challenge in the short-term is finishing school so that we can work on the app full-time."
Thanks to the Univjobs platform, graduates at Sheridan and Brock have a better chance at starting their career paths on the right foot. But the future is just as bright for Charles and the team at Univjobs, who have developed a viable and effective solution to a very real problem.