In this episode, Justin Dux chats with Jeffrey Moss. Jeffrey works with colleges, universities, foundations, companies, and students to help improve the college-to-career transition process. While many organizations focus on college accessibility (which is vital), those pursuing a degree or have already graduated can get ignored. As a result, Career Launchers, many of whom have demonstrated their skills and grit, successfully overcoming obstacles to earn a degree, are often underemployed after graduation.
Beyond Parker Dewey, Jeffrey is passionate about the importance of education for all students. After recognizing how lucky he was to be the product of New Jersey public schools (though he did not feel so lucky at the time), Jeffrey has worked to improve educational outcomes for those students who are not so fortunate. Both as an investor and through non-profit endeavors, Jeffrey has supported organizations serving K-12 students, individuals with special needs, college and universities, and adult learners. He also helps his two daughters with their homework.
Jeffrey served in senior operating roles with Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Specialized Education Services (acquired by Catapult Learning). Jeffrey spent much of his career as a venture capital investor supporting technology-enabled organizations in the education, business services, and software sectors. Jeffrey’s investments include Connections Education (acquired by Pearson), Ashworth College, Progressus Therapy, Fleetcor (NYSE: FLT), ProClarity (acquired by Microsoft), Avectra (acquired by Abila), and The SAVO Group.
Jeffrey serves on the Indiana University Kelley School of Business Alumni Board and the Dean’s Advisory Council for Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts. His other Board responsibilities have included: Chairman of the Board of Workstream (Nasdaq: WSTM), a software provider for human resources departments; OneGoal, a non-profit focused on college accessibility and persistence; and the Illinois Venture Capital Association.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- Jeffrey’s background
- Micro-Internships - what they are, how Parker Dewey was started
- How micro-internships benefit both the student and the employer
- Traditional internships vs micro-internships
- Micro-Internship best practices for college students or recent grads
- How to start micro-internships as an employer
HELP US OUT!
Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES:
- Remote Internships 101
- Why recent grads should consider a micro-internship
- Transitioning from college to the working world
- Parker Dewey website - head here if you are interested in a micro-internship, career launch or related resources
- Statistics Jeffrey mentions:
- 55% of recent college grads leave their first job within the first year
- Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn, Twitter or his website.
TRANSCRIPT
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
Justin Dux (00:00):
Welcome to CareerCloud Radio. I'm your host, Justin Dux. Careercloud.com is your resource for tips, tricks, and tools to shorten your job search. Become a modern job seeker by listening to these episodes or reading articles on our website. Job hunting sucks, we are here to make it better with us. Today is Jeffrey Moss. He was mentioned on a show last year by Leslie Mettler about something called micro internships, but we'll get into that here in a second. If you listen to the show for a while, you know, I started every interview with the same dreaded job interview question. So Jeffrey, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Jeffrey Moss (00:39):
Sure. Thanks Justin. Thanks for having me, not that interesting. I joke around them sort of an accidental entrepreneur. My background is actually as a private equity investor with a focus in education in technology, and having had the pleasure to work with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years, I knew how difficult it was and how challenging it was. But about six years ago, had this idea for the micro internship, really the solve, the challenges associated with college to career transition spent the better part of a year, researching the space, trying to find companies doing it and ultimately could not and realized it was a great idea and could really create wins for those launching their careers for companies and for universities alike. So launched Parker Dewey about five years ago.
Justin Dux (01:25):
I love it. This is a problem that I saw needed to be solved as well. About three years ago, as I started hosting the show and I would get reached out to tons of college kids, reach out, you know, help me break in what can I do? And there wasn't a really good strategy that I would known, especially as a newer in the space to share with them. So walk me through it. Two perspectives perspective of a potential employer that is posting for what you called the micro internship and the perspective of maybe a job seeker or student that might be wanting to take advantage of one of those. What is both people's perspective as they reach out,
Jeffrey Moss (02:05):
You hit on what's really a vital point that so many of the attempts to solve this college to career challenge really only solve it for one of those parties. Now, for companies, to your point, they're facing a variety of challenges. First of all, they're all recruiting the same students from the same schools based upon academic pedigree, GPA, major family connections. And ironically, those attributes don't predict who's a good hire. We've all brought in people that seem great on paper that have incredible resumes. And then it gets to the interview and you quickly realize it's not the right fit. And that's, if you're lucky, even worse is if you bring them in for a summer internship or full-time role and you are, they realize it's not the right fit. So companies are feeling it. And at the same time, what they're also feeling is this desire to expand access, to drive diversity and inclusion, to ensure equitable pathways.
Jeffrey Moss (03:00):
The other thing they find is that 55% of recent college grads leave their first job within the first year. So companies are spending over $6,000 to recruit a college student to join, and then 55% of them leave after companies spent all of this additional money training. The other thing that's also interesting is at the same time that companies are struggling with their campus recruiting, you're finding that hiring managers tend to be under-resourced. I mean, think about your average day, just and think about all of these projects that you have on your own plate. That may not be the highest and best use of your time or projects that there's just not enough hours in the day for while you are busy,
Justin Dux (03:41):
Regular conversations with my boss prioritization of these
Jeffrey Moss (03:46):
Priority, we all do. We call them the, we should, as in the I shouldn't, we should go write a new article on a given topic. We should update a blog post. We should create a social media calendar, but who has the time or I shouldn't, I shouldn't be spending my time on the Saturday morning crunching through a conference list or doing a first draft of a competitive analysis. Again, while for a busy professional, it may not be the highest and best use of time for highly motivated college student looking to explore different career paths or looking to demonstrate skills or looking to build their resume or build relationships. Those projects are both intellectually interesting and help them in that professional development. So for the companies they're struggling and as I alluded to college, students are struggling as well. How do I, as college students are struggling as well.
Jeffrey Moss (04:38):
If I'm a college student, I'm fortunate enough to go to a great school and have a high GPA and have a major that sounds like a job title. How do I really know what I want to do? Yes, I'm a marketing major, but do I want to do marketing analytics versus content versus brand management or social media? Do I want to work at a big company or small? Do I want to work in a consumer packaged good company or a tech company or in financial services? There's all of these options and students are being asked to jump right into the engagement of a summer internship and the marriage of a full-time role without the opportunity to really date beforehand, without the opportunity to really explore what all of those different things mean. And that's again, assuming I'm lucky enough to have all of those advantages, whether if I'm a student with a major that doesn't sound like a job title, I don't see any companies with the job title of philosopher.
Jeffrey Moss (05:29):
Now, Google has not even Google has that, that job title, but you know what? I have research skills and communication and problem solving. And I know how to craft an argument. How do I understand where that applies to a variety of professions, where if I'm not fortunate enough to have a high GPA, maybe I'm a first-generation student, or maybe I'm working part-time while in school you're, you're getting filtered out based upon those things that don't predict how smart you are, what skills you have or your grit. What we're trying to do is really create this opportunity where both sides, sides, when we're both sides can get to know one another through these low-risk short term projects, not as a replacement for the summer internship or full-time role, but to my earlier comment, as a date,
Justin Dux (06:13):
I've heard the analogy or comparison to dating before. And I want to try to change it up a little bit because it's been used because, and also the last 12 months, peop dating has drastically changed. I mean, you, you can't meet people, I've know some friends that have described the horrors of a zoom date and how you just don't feel like you can make this connection with people. And this isn't,
Jeffrey Moss (06:39):
My wife is happy to be married. Yeah.
Justin Dux (06:43):
Even my life, I think the employers have the same lack of connection and they filter on those criteria. You mentioned, but I love that you're targeting or your best client might be those misfits that weren't going to get the job anyway. Like there's those candidates that got the straight A's. They got the six internships. Well, they were in their four year program. They go in, they sit down and they get a job with the same title as their last six internships. I don't care about them. They're doing fine on their own. Probably I love this person. Who's got three completely different internships. Might find your site Parker, dewey.com and have a new option available to them.
Jeffrey Moss (07:29):
Well, but it's not mutually exclusive. And that's one of the nice things is that everyone wins. And first of all, for the individual that may have done a whole bunch of internships beforehand, traditional internships, they may have done them only in a single field or with a single company. What happens when they take that full-time job and they start to wonder is the grass greener elsewhere? So I did all my internships in finance, but gosh, I'm sorta curious about a startup. And then they go and job hopping realized startups, not the right fit, or they don't leave. And they wind up constantly questioning if they should be in the current role that we have, this grass is greener issue. And then to your point, for those who don't have those opportunities, who again, get filtered out, this truly lets them demonstrate their skills in a way that's much more meaningful than a GPA.
Jeffrey Moss (08:21):
And the other thing that's really interesting and you brought up the dating metaphor also, is that what we're hearing from college students is that the experience this year in particular, but it's been true even during the past six years, the experience of searching for a job feels fake and artificial. They'll go visit a company's website and they all look the same. They all have the same language about the wonderful team culture. They all have the same language about the importance of inclusion in the picture. Yeah. And the pictures with the token folks, then they go to an interview and they realize no one, no one looks like me. No one has my background. Or they said that it was going to be a certain type of environment, but I actually go and start and realize it's different. Or what about the student who doesn't even explore the student who is, has preconceived notions about Pepsi? So they've all heard about Pepsi is so the company, but they're not visiting the career site because they're not thinking about it for strategy roles or technology roles or finance roles. The whole process is fake and are the official, our big question, the whole thesis behind Parker Dewey is can we create an opportunity for short-term experiences that are much more authentic for students and companies alike and give both sides, insights, and perspectives that get lost through the nonsense marketing of the career fair and web page and everything else. That's so false and inauthentic.
Justin Dux (09:53):
I love it. I keep saying that, but it's just cause I'm so excited. Give both sides. That phrase stands out in my mind because both sides, the employer for the short term micro internship and the candidate, who's going to possibly walk away, go to a different company. They both get something out of this.
Jeffrey Moss (10:12):
That's what you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, that was the whole thesis that the reason this model works. And when we, when we founded Parker Dewey six years ago, what we saw happening was the emergence of the gig economy for the first time ever companies were willing to let individuals outside of their four walls, do professional projects. And we said, what if we apply that to college students? So instead of it being about geographic arbitrage, instead of it being let's send work overseas for pennies on the dollar instead, let's give it to highly motivated college students. And what we found to your point is all of this additional value was created. So in a basic gig model, I, as a freelancer, want to do as little work as possible for as much money. And I, as a company, want to pay as little as possible for as much work.
Jeffrey Moss (11:02):
What we found to your point is through micro internships, both sides get additional value without sort of correlating cost to the other side. So as a company, I'm still getting the work done, but I'm also getting the value of getting to know students who may not have applied to my company or building my brand or accessing students at schools that we haven't historically recruited from or supporting diversity equity and inclusion initiatives. And for students, I'm still getting paid for my work, but I'm also getting this other ancillary value of building my resume and demonstrating skills and exploring career paths and building relationships, getting them that's. What we love about this is both sides win. This. Isn't a zero sum game. And ironically, there's actually a third stakeholder as well. And it's the reason our logo sort of the three circle Venn diagram, which is the university's while all of this is taking place.
Jeffrey Moss (11:59):
Think about how this supports the universities in helping them best prepare their students for full-time careers. Think about the insights they're getting about the career readiness. Think about their opportunities to build relationships with employers, deepen relationships with alumni. Again, there's very few spots in education where all of the interests of the different stakeholders are aligned. One of the reasons I love college to career is all three of those stakeholders have the same interest. Students want to land the best job when graduation companies want to hire the best recent college grads and the colleges want to see the students and the employers satisfied with sort of those mutually beneficial wins.
Justin Dux (12:41):
That's a perfect alignment. Do you ever work on the edges too though? Maybe an adult student who's pivoting careers. Can they come through a micro internship path or have you really narrowed it down and targeted and focused in your business on just the recent grads?
Jeffrey Moss (12:59):
Yeah, there was a term in there that I just want to correct. It is nothing to do with adult or age at all, but we are 100% focused on that transition from college to career. We don't care whether it's an adult learner, a traditional learner, someone in undergrad versus grad school, we believe the college to career transition process is fundamentally broken. And the reason it's broken is that for college student or recent grad there's so few data points that highlight or showcase their skills. All they have is in the academic transcript, what their major was, maybe a summer internship or two, but that's it. One shirt later in your career, micro internships are just less relevant because someone can easily look at Justin and look at the work that you've done in your background and your experiences, and be able to assess, does Justin have strong communication skills or attention to detail or problem solving? And you can talk about those experiences in a thoughtful way, in an interview for early career professionals. Again, irrespective of age, they don't have those artifacts or examples that they can share in an interview. And there's no effective way for a company to assess those skills.
Justin Dux (14:15):
There's another alignment that I'm seeing. I'm not sure if you've heard of it yet. So this might my apologies. If I start to come across, like I'm pitching, but it's because I'm in this community that I'm about to bring up and I'm not sure if you've heard of it yet, but I'm in the Salesforce administration community. And I see those early career transitioners that are leaving completely unrelated fields, like a trucking industry or a travel agencies or private cruises or hotels. And then they're going to become a technology worker and it's just as big jarring shift for some people. So I liked your example of it. I look at your resume. I see that Justin has skills. Sometimes it's not as apparent like customer service can be implied. Maybe if I worked retail or a customer service, heavy job like sales, but I've been looking at some resumes recently this year that look farther apart than that even. And so this concept of getting a short term experience is very, very valuable and very intriguing to some other communities. I'm curious, let's first define real quick. How short are you usually talking?
Jeffrey Moss (15:25):
Sure. Typical micro internship takes the career launcher on the average between 10 and four of the hours to complete and is due a few days to a few weeks out. There's no magic to those numbers, but that's what we've seen. Typically, what we found is when projects go much longer than that, companies revert to their traditional ways of selecting candidates, meaning based upon academic pedigree or students revert to their normal way of selecting, which companies they want. That said, we've seen a lot of micro internships when the initial 10, 20, 30 hour project leads to subsequent projects. And then some cases leads to a summer internship or full-time role or something else. But typical project is meant to be bite-sized. And I know you didn't like the dating analogy, but it's a good one. And by the way, it wasn't mine. It was a college student's analogy where they said, am I willing to get engaged to someone that seems outside of my comfort zone? Now I'm not going to jump right into engagement, but will I go on a date? Sure. I'll go on a date. Worst that happens is I have a dinner and I have a couple of stories. Like that's the downside. And those are the types of experiences we're trying to create these ones that have high potential, but low risk for both sides.
Justin Dux (16:47):
I'm seeing another problem you solve that you didn't even mention yet clarity and deliverable by narrowing the time constraint you bring into focus. Exactly what to do. How many interns have shown that of two days, they're just delivering costs because the employer didn't know, we'll get this intern for three months. Like we'll figure out something for, to do here. Yeah.
Jeffrey Moss (17:09):
Yeah. You're a hundred percent. Right. And that's one of the things we talk about with the good micro internship, define beginning to find and define deliverable. We want you to research and draft an 800 to a thousand word article on blank. We want you to do a competitive analysis of the companies in the XYZ space or create a social media calendar for the coming month or cleanse the data for these 100 records. Yes, there is a defined deliverable. Now, one of the side benefits beyond the fact to your point that it manages and sets expectations for the hiring manager and the micro internal, like one of the other benefits we're hearing from HR leaders is it helps quote unquote retrain the hiring manager as to what they should expect from an intern. And in fact, last summer, we were spending a lot of time working with companies on how the transition their 10 weeks, summer internship program to a remote environment, not to be crystal clear.
Jeffrey Moss (18:08):
I am a believer in the 10 to 12 week onsite, summer internship. I think it is insanely valuable. It is a great way for both sides to do a deep dive. Last summer, obviously onsite was impossible for most organizations given the pandemic and we're expecting most are going to find similar situations. This year. One of the things we found is as hiring managers were using micro internships, they started to take that same philosophy even to their summer interns. So Jeff is the summer intern for the marketing department. Let's think about his experience as a series of discrete projects. The first one is a competitive analysis. The second one is market research. The third one is content, but fourth is a social media calendar where those different projects, again, define beginning defined deliverable, defined and create a great experience for both sides. The other thing we've seen is a lot of companies create a more holistic experience for their summer interns.
Jeffrey Moss (19:09):
So Jeff might be the marketing intern, let's have him do for marketing projects, but let's also have him do one or two projects in sales or in product design and give him exposure to other parts of the company. Not only does that provide us as a company, more opportunities to evaluate Jeff and his skillset, including the very important skill of adaptability, but it also provides the intern a better experience because he or she can understand how his or her role fits within the larger organization. What that means is it's a better experience for that individual, but they're also more likely to convert. They're also more likely to see the value in their work. They're also more likely to build relationships with a variety of different people within the organization leading to better hiring outcomes. Overall,
Justin Dux (19:57):
I'd like to propose to any employers that hear this episode too, that there is a downstream long tail benefit to this too. I know that you're not describing doing 15 of these a year for an employer, but let's say they did. You could be creating 15 ambassadors for your company that go and leave and work for somebody else. You know, like anyone who gets their first shot, like is going to be very passionate about that employer, even if they don't stick with it.
Jeffrey Moss (20:26):
Oh my God. Yeah. A hundred percent agree. A hundred percent agree. I mean, we're, we're doing programs for companies where they have sort of formal brand ambassadors and the traditional way that companies use brand ambassadors on campus. But we're finding to your point that a lot of the companies are getting almost informal brand ambassadors has student does a micro for a company they're talking with their friends, they're talking with their peers, they're talk like they are huge vocal advocates of those organizations. And whether you're a well-known brand like my example of Pepsi before or smaller, less well-known brand where students may not have heard of it, that there's a great opportunity to build your brand equity with regards to your comment about 15 micro internships. I'm not sure. I mean, we're seeing companies doing hundreds, if not thousands of these micro internships throughout the year.
Jeffrey Moss (21:19):
So if you think about some of the biggest companies out there where they hire a thousand, 2,003,000 summer interns every year in our conversations with them, they're looking at micro internship programs that could be in the tens of thousands every year, because what they realized is they have can thousands of hiring managers that all have these discrete projects where they can use an extra set of hands. How wonderful if they can sort of provide those opportunities to college students and uses it as a way for those organizations to recruit top of funnel, more effectively to engage students that may not have been applying to engage students who may have gotten missed because they didn't go to the quote unquote right school, or have the quote unquote right. GPA or major family connections. So what they're doing is they're providing their hiring managers with this on-demand resource to get immediate support while to your point building this great army of Behrend ambassadors and a pipeline of pre-vetted candidates for their summer internship and full-time recruiting efforts.
Justin Dux (22:25):
Absolutely. Clearly you've already convinced me. So I have to try to impersonate a skeptic from time to time. There's another circle on the map here, the one you sit in. So imagine I'm a major employer like Walmart, and I'm hearing this episode thinking that sounds great. Let's start up our own department. I imagine you bring some expertise to this table and I want to hear what you've learned in the last six years. You kind of feel like it's going to be your secret sauce for why it's going to be better to bridge between with Parker Dewey.
Jeffrey Moss (22:57):
Yeah. I mean, look, we get that question all the time. Especially again, for well-known employers, we found a few things. First of all, any company can build its own micro internship program without the doubt. And we provide a ton of resources on our website on best practices and the like as a mission oriented organization, we fundamentally believe in micro internships and we wanna see them continue to be adopted by organizations as a valuable part of their campus, recruiting retention and diversity initiatives. So a hundred percent supportive. What we found is the reason some of these very very large companies choose to work with us is a few things. First of all, to your point, having done this for six years, we have an incredible library and series of resources to ensure micro internships go really, really well resources for HR teams to introduce them to professionals in marketing or sales or it or finance or all of these other departments to make it really easy for them to introduce again. How often does HR have the opportunity to go to these different departments with a resource that makes their life easier?
Justin Dux (24:08):
I've got a project list. I'd love to give to somebody. If they've come to me with some new certification in Salesforce, it's just a discussion I have to have with my boss and then HR. And then, you know, there's a lot of enrolling there to do. What department do you like to start in? Like in, have you seen a pattern where you come into marketing and then end up in three departments in two years? Pretty cool.
Jeffrey Moss (24:30):
We have. And that was the way we started it. When we first launched this thing six years ago, we didn't have the credibility to go to HR and say, Hey, you have these problems with campus recruiting. Here's this micro internship thing. You never heard of replace what you're doing with career fairs and info sessions with like, we didn't have that credibility. So we were going direct to marketing, to sales, to finance, to operations, to accounting, to finance, really one understanding the project needs that they have. And to proving that college students could execute those projects without creating more work for them. So yes, we have an incredible network of advocates and that's one of the reasons the HR departments love us now is this becomes easy for them to introduce the other reason that they choose to work with us versus doing it themselves is to use your example before Walmart, Walmart could launch a micro internship program, but that would requires the students visiting the Walmart site and having a desire to visit their career page and learn about.
Jeffrey Moss (25:33):
And then proactively apply. What we found is through our platform. The students are intellectually interested in intellectually curious and working on these micro internships and wanting to explore. So while using your example, they may not be thinking about Walmart is a potential employer. They may have preconceived notions of what it means to work at Walmart. They may see an interesting strategy or marketing or finance or operations or accounting or supply chain, or it project on Parker, Dewey for Walmart and say, oh, I didn't realize Walmart had that. I thought the only roles they were going to have when they recruit on my campus, where cashier, that looks interesting, I'm going to go apply. So again, you can break down those preconceived notions. And the difference is companies like Walmart, they're spending millions of dollars a year trying to market to college students. They're sending emails, they're updating web pages.
Jeffrey Moss (26:28):
They're paying third parties to sort of create a great employee or candidate experience. And it's not working. Students don't want to read those emails. They're getting hundreds of them a day. They don't want to visit all of these career sites. They are zoomed out. They don't want to sit in another info session. What they told us last summer and was confirmed when we re surveyed the students in December is they'll want the zoom sessions. They don't want the info sessions. They don't want to read about the company, what they most value or real experiences with the firm. So instead of spending thousands of dollars to try to get through someone's inbox, where the create a great candidate experience, give them a real opportunity to work on at your company, give them a real project, something your hiring manager doesn't want to do. And that the college student is excited to do. Give them that opportunity. It's going to cost less money. It's gonna cost 40 to 80% less. When you look at cost per hire, and it's going to create a better experience for the candidate and for your hiring manager. Yeah, Not that I'm opinionated.
Justin Dux (27:36):
Well, I'm going back to my earlier point, micro internships, turn into micro ambassadors, and those will have a longer term value that you're not even monetizing yet. And I want to talk about value here with my final point. I'm familiar with the old economics concept of the supply and demand intersection. The, so they call them the curves, but usually they're drawn as a straight line supply curve, demand curve. They intersect at that point is your optimal price, the best price for your market and all sorts of other factors, supply meets demand. Now, what I find has been really fascinating the last 10 years is we're seeing a lot of technologies coming and seeing them make it easier to monetize below that point or above that point. I call it below the curve, above the curve. It's the area that shades in where they overlap. I think we're seeing this happen in real estate right now, very clearly with the pandemic and the change in the supply.
Justin Dux (28:33):
The inventory drastically changed because they're not building new houses at the same pace because of a pandemic and scare about whether or not the economy is going to crash again. But that seems more basic supply and to supply was impacted. So why did that affect price? No, no, no. There's still one more factor going on. People don't bid on a house and pay that intersection price what's going on there. They're willing to pay more. So they do. Right. And so I see you have a value proposition in a similar situation. Where do you place yourself? Do you feel like your value is below the curve or above though? Like, are they delivering more value because they're willing and eager students? Or is the employer just getting cheaper labor?
Jeffrey Moss (29:19):
Yeah. Your comment there about real estates, especially true during COVID you probably hear my wife in the background cause we probably need a bigger place, but the point about supply and demand is an interesting one because we actually don't think college to career has a supply issue or a demand issue. We think there's a matching issue. So when you look at the fact that 47% of all recent college grads are under unemployed and the fact that companies complain that they struggle to fill open roles, like that's not a constraint on the supplier demand, there's plenty of jobs and there's plenty of candidates. The issue has always been a matching issue that companies are artificially limiting their pool of potential candidates based upon things that again are non predictive based upon things like GPA or pedigree and students are artificially limiting their pool of potential jobs based upon preconceived notions or expectations about roles that they're oftentimes false.
Jeffrey Moss (30:18):
What we're trying to do is actually just fix the matching process that is opposed to that high stakes. We need to jump into the 10 week summer internship or full-time role where people rely on traditional processes. That again, don't really work. Let's fundamentally change it. Let's lower the stakes. And what we think is by lowering the stakes, we can help move the market better to that equilibrium of supply meeting demand. I mean, that's the focus here is that again, both sides can win and both sides are struggling. And we don't think it's one side versus the other or the zero sum game to the earlier comment. But rather through these projects, additional value is created by both sides without any additional costs. Does that make any sense? The did actually a you're bringing downward pressure on both to bring to it back to that optimal price.
Jeffrey Moss (31:12):
I love it. Well, and it's not necessarily downward pressure. It's just bringing it to the equilibrium because when we say downward pressure, I worry that it could be implied as well. Let's lower the price and let's lower the quality. That's not the case at all. What we're saying is that there's all of these other opportunity where both sides can get additional value without creating additional cost to the other party. And we've simply create a platform that gets rid of those other costs. So for instance, one of the decisions we may, when we launched is we don't, and we never will charge attempt to perm fee, meaning that if a company works with Jeff on the micro internship and wants to hire me for a summer internship or a full-time role, they don't know any other money. There's no like 10% temp to perm or staff.
Jeffrey Moss (31:59):
Like, because that is way different than the recruiting industry. Yeah. Because we don't want to create that disincentive to hire. We don't want some company to say, oh yeah, we're going to hire that student who was the amazing micro intern, but we have to pay someone five or 10 grand. Let's look at someone else. Or instead of paying Jeff X thousand a year, we're going to pay him something materially less. Again, that's a misalignment of interest. We don't want that to happen. We want to create win-wins. So we stay out of the way. It's the same reason. There's no like subscription or sign up fee. It's the same reason. All of the students are paid directly by Parker Dewey. We want to get rid of every point of friction.
Justin Dux (32:41):
Great. So what should people do next? If they're a potential interns, they should go to Parker, dewey.com, right?
Jeffrey Moss (32:50):
Yes. So for those interested in working on micro internships, the career launchers, where they're college students or recent grads, they can visit Parker, dewey.com beyond access to the platform. There's a ton of resources there that could just be really useful in everything to do with career exploration, landing, the right summer internship and full-time role, obviously best practices for micro internships. And then for companies that want to offer micro internships or wanting to explore the benefits of experiential recruiting or find other best practices, whether they want to do it through Parker Dewey or on their own, there's a ton of resources at Parker, dewey.com as well. Okay.
Justin Dux (33:28):
And if I'm a Salesforce administrator with a backlog of mile long, and I go to my boss, should I just give them the website, Parker, dewey.com or what's the two sentences I should put in that email?
Jeffrey Moss (33:38):
Sure. This is the most effective way to get work done and identify engaged, necess highly motivated career launchers. And what's great is you can do it yourself. You don't even need to go to your boss. The way Parker Dewey is structured is as easy as going to Kinko's. You can put it on your corporate card, select a student. There's no 10 90 nines and W2's no temp to perm fee. All of the students are under NDA. We make it simple. So for busy professionals that just need the extra set of hands on those we should. And I shouldn't projects. There's millions of college students who are excited to help give them the opportunity.
Justin Dux (34:17):
Love it. Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
Jeffrey Moss (34:20):
My pleasure, wonderful being here and thanks for all the work you're doing, as you said, college to career can be so challenging for so many folks. So love the work you're doing to help.
Justin Dux (34:30):
It gives me peace at night, knowing that somebody has solved this matching problem.
Jeffrey Moss (34:35):
Thank you. That is way too kind.
Justin Dux (34:38):
CareerCloud Radio is a production of careercloud.com. Please review this episode on iTunes. We really appreciate it a lot. And thank you.
