Finding a job after college can be quite the challenge, but CEO Chris Motley is helping to ease the frustration and make the job-seeking process for college grads as painless as possible.
Better Weekdays, a startup founded by Motley in 2011, is a job-matching platform that helps universities better measure and improve the job outcomes of its graduates. Its main focus is on millennials who currently make up the largest demographic of the workforce.
The company’s vision is to create career pathways by facilitating meaningful conversation between job seekers and employers.
Originally located in Chicago, the headquarters of Better Weekdays now resides in downtown St. Louis in the technology incubator T-REX. The startup has a touch-point with almost every university in the region including Washington University in St. Louis and works with several other universities across the country such as Harvard and DeVry.
Capturing 1 million current job openings per day, Better Weekdays helps connect college graduates with opportunity and helps companies target individuals based on job compatibility and culture fit.
“People think of Better Weekdays as the eHarmony® for recruiting,” Motley said.
The job matching process through Better Weekdays is thorough but still rather simple. It pairs students with jobs based on their skill levels, experiences, and preferences.
Users complete a self-assessment that gathers information such as preferred job location and area of focus, personality, values and interests. Skills can be assessed by a student’s degree program or resume.
Although many universities offer their own job matching services, Better Weekdays stands out from the crowd and provides a personalized user experience unique from any other. Unlike most job matching platforms, Better Weekdays is mobile.
The company has thought holistically about the its customer base and knows that nowadays most people, college students especially, do just about anything and everything on their phones. The platform meets people where they are on their mobile devices, which is a great asset when it comes to job discovery.
A note from MTC Director Bill Anderson
“Better Weekdays has taken the idea of a simple job matching platform and transformed it into an incredible tool for employers, educators, and students alike to utilize throughout the job-recruiting process. Missouri is proud to support outstanding new companies like Better Weekdays that place Missouri on the forefront of innovative workforce solutions.”
Better Weekdays has certainly taken off, and Motley attributes a large part of the company’s early success to the Missouri Technology Corporation.
MTC started with an initial investment in the startup of $175,000 and committed more capital later on, giving Motley the funding needed to expand his team. Since closing with MTC last year, Better Weekdays has grown from two to 15 team members.
Along with helping Better Weekdays raise the capital needed to grow, MTC has also helped the company manage momentum and grab the interest of additional investors.
“Not only does MTC enhance the size of my investment, but the connections in the community and the visibility of MTC in general can help you get to these other goals,” Motley said.
In just a few short years since its founding, the online job-matching platform has made outstanding progress. The company not only raised $1.5 million in capital last year, but was also selected by the White House to participate in President Barack Obama’s new TechHire initiative.
As for the future, things are still looking up. Better Weekdays recently signed a deal that gave the company access to over 300 universities nationwide and has one million in contracts it is working on closing right now.
Motley says the biggest goal for the startup is to continue to grow by attracting talent to the region, retaining talent in the region and helping people understand that Missouri is one of the best places in the country where you can make a difference.
“If we can do that, then we’ll be very successful,” he said.
