The challenge
To fill more than 165 fellowship positions a year, VP of Talent MaryCatherine Wright and her team of three recruiters need to do outbound recruiting at scale, while building brand awareness with college students who may be unfamiliar with VFA’s two-year fellowship. As a non-profit with a lean team, they have limited resources to travel or to run sourcing platforms that require hours of manual work. VFA’s ideal applicant can come from any academic background so long as they show interest in entrepreneurship and startups, which makes candidates hard to target by major or technical skill alone.
The solution
VFA layers several virtual recruiting platforms, including RippleMatch, LinkedIn and Handshake Premium, on top of its on-campus strategy to reach talent nationwide. RippleMatch stood out for its ease of use and its ability to target candidates by interest and experience with startups and entrepreneurship rather than by major or technical qualification, all without requiring VFA to run campaigns or do manual outreach.
Side-by-side comparison
| Metric | Handshake | RippleMatch | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate response rate | 4% | 92% | 23× higher |
The results
RippleMatch is now Venture For America’s #1 source of applicants, driving roughly 25% of all fellowship applicants each year. The platform lets the team target active job-seekers instead of passive candidates, and its candidate response rate reached 92%, compared with 4% on Handshake. The consistent flow of applicants and the platform’s analytics have let MaryCatherine demonstrate a clear ROI and justify multiple renewals with leadership.
In their words:
"RippleMatch has already paid for itself. We see outcomes on our investment on a weekly basis from the consistent flow of applicants we get, and it’s one of our top sources of hires."
— MaryCatherine Wright, VP of Talent, Venture For America
"RippleMatch is far and away superior to other platforms for what we do, hands down. We haven’t gone to campus in 2 years, so we rely on it heavily to fill our roles."
— MaryCatherine Wright, VP of Talent, Venture For America
