ScholarJet

We help companies attract diverse college talents through scholarship competitions that challenge students to showcase their skills for employment.

At ScholarJet, we believe that students should be rewarded to pursue their education by doing the things that they love and good at. Our mission is to change the world through competitions that can help level the playing field for students from underserved communities. They are the ones who will help us create a better and more exciting future. 

Companies are struggling to recruit and engage the next generation of talent. Only 22% of employers are confident in their talent pipeline and ability to fill critical positions. (Source) 92% believe it is a “brand problem” when it comes to their recruiting efforts, finding it difficult to compete with top employers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. (Source)

At the same time, it has become widely known that companies that are diverse are more successful. (Source) This has created a huge demand across all sectors to recruit diverse talent. (Source)

Traditionally, companies have built their talent pipelines through universities- offering internships and co-ops, but it takes much more than a well-paying job to attract talent today. 64% of millennials won’t take a job at a company without strong social values. (Source) 80% of millennials state “people and culture fit” is a number one priority in selecting an employer. (Source)

Companies are looking left and right for effective ways to build positive brand awareness and develop their diverse talent pipelines.

84% of companies understand that college hiring is important for talent pipeline development. (Source) This number is also still seeing upward trends, with increases in both intern and co-op hiring from 2016-2017. (Source) On average, companies are spending about $500K on university recruiting, with 80% of those same companies focusing on diversity. (Source) But they are wasting millions to only recruit from a few colleges. (Source)

ScholarJet is initially targeting companies who already have established internship/co-op programs and especially those with diversity recruiting efforts. The key stakeholders are university relations, HR, diversity and inclusion executives.

The student population is primarily comprised of undergraduate college students with financial need, focused especially on state schools and community colleges. College students are dropping out at a rate of over 45% mainly because of finance. (Source)

ScholarJet helps employers recruit and build a pipeline of diverse college talent through company-branded competitions that award students money to pay for their education.

These competitions are called “action-based scholarships”. They enable students to display more skills that are important to employers, like coding, 3D modeling, sales, graphic design, video creation and more.

Instead of attending dozens of career fairs, companies simply post a competition onto ScholarJet’s platform, which is full of highly motivated and talented students from diverse backgrounds. Then, the company selects a winner and connects with any students who might be a good fit for an internship, co-op, or full-time position.

Traditionally there are many regulatory and restrictive perception of scholarships - that it has to be coming from a non-profit and essay-based. ScholarJet is riding on the wave of ever-changing human behavior towards technology. Gen Z and Millennials are relevant demographics of who we are trying to work with. We’re combining elements from social media, social impact model, recruiting tools and hackathon model to turn the model of scholarships upside down. 

Our platform technology enables us to scale our solution across the U.S. We understand that as an organization without technologies we can help thousands, but with our platform, we can help millions. It can also be further enhanced through a mobile app.

ScholarJet’s roadmap for implementing our solution includes many API integrations to existing process for better efficiency. We are also considering blockchain to incentivize students to participate in competitions. Lastly, one of the hardest scalable aspects of our process is judging. We are planning on solving this with our predictable model, AI, and Machine Learning.

We are looking to work with over 40+ companies in Massachusetts and create partnerships that enable us to have a reach of over 100,000+ students. At the same time, we will be implementing a roadmap for consumer mobile apps. 

Currently, are working with 10 customers, and have a reach of 30,000+ students.

Once we have improved our process efficiency in Massachusetts, we will be able to bring our solution across the U.S. by expanding our onboarding strategies from cities that have a high density of colleges and universities. We will grow both our students and companies base. 

ScholarJet has a potential expansion to work with individual donors, selling our software to university for admission and alumni engagement purposes, and creating student loans repayment competitions as a way for companies to attract talent with student loan debt. 

Direct sales have been the primary channel of reaching customers, but we’re now starting to invest into building longer-term partnerships with recruiting companies and a more robust digital marketing strategy.

Our beachhead market is SMBs as a way of building earlier traction, because of their faster sales cycle and lesser demand for applicants. By focusing on SMBs first, we can generate a supply of scholarships quickly to attract more students.

We acquire students through social media advertising and campus events. We also partner directly with career services departments of colleges and nonprofit organizations who target students from underserved communities.

We have given away over $22,500 in action-based scholarships and impacted over 180 students. We understand the need for building a portfolio towards your career, therefore every submission we receive count towards building that portfolio as impact. These students are undergraduate college students who came from low-income backgrounds.

ScholarJet is expected to receive over 1,000 submissions in 12 months. In 3 years we will have over 50,000 submissions. These students are undergraduate college students who came from low-income backgrounds.

Our solution has proven to have a viral effect through words of mouth (Source). Students feel special and recognized by participating in our competitions as we make sure their talent is known to local companies.

The more competitions we can create through different companies the more we can expect to impact more students through the process.

Tuan (CEO/Co-founder), a Priscilla Chan Stride Fellow, has over 8 years in various leadership roles in civic engagement. Joseph Alim (COO/Co-founder) has a MS in Engineering Management and experience from GE, Medtronic and Instron. Francisco Calderon (CTO/Co-founder) is a full-stack developer with experience from Carbonite and Dell EMC.

We came from underserved communities and worked hard to get to where we are today. We know we have a lot more to learn and iterate on our solution and are willing to take advice. We’re willing to go beyond our network to make sure ScholarJet in this timeline.

ScholarJet makes money by charging companies fees on top of the scholarships and placement fees.
 
One option is to pay $5,000 total every 6 months- where $3,000 will go towards the scholarship and $2,000 will go to ScholarJet.
 
The other option is to commit to an annual $20,000 membership- where a company can create up to 6 scholarships a year, but no additional fee per scholarship. This membership fee will eventually vary based on the number of scholarships created per year, access to students, and geographic reach.

We are still pressure testing our pricing model and it will continuously evolve over time. What we focus on right now is to get more scholarships through the door in order to collect more data rather than driving more profit. Once we have created a repeatable 5 stars experience for companies we can really hone in on maximizing impact and profit. 

Solve is a community of peers, partnerships, and networks that are serious in solving the world’s most challenging problem. We understand the pragmatic optimism behind each individual who is involved in the organization. And we are the type of entrepreneurs who take advantage of every resource that we can get as well as having the willingness to take advice. Solve is the perfect community that ScholarJet want to be a part of. 

The first barrier is technology, what’s in the road-map for ScholarJet requires us to stay on the edge of innovation and how it can be applied to building relationships with humanity and community. The second barrier is business strategy expertise. As first time entrepreneurs who are trying to create a social enterprise that can potentially disrupt a market, we have only our determination and hard-work as our credibility in the eyes of investors and partners. With the expertise of Solve, we can steer towards a direction where there is a higher percentage that action-based scholarship can become a reality.