Recruiting’s digital revolution has been a boon for job seekers around the world, and now students and recent graduates have a tool designed to connect them with the best employers possible.

Your first job out of college probably felt like the most important event of your life, and for many, looking back, it was as pivotal as if felt back them. Imagine there’d been tech to tailor-match your skills to prospective employers looking for students and recent grads just like you? Well, let Melissa Weir, Head of B2B Marketing at WayUp tell you a few things about what WayUp can do to help you with that.

Check out WayUp and others on the SmartRecruiters marketplace!

What was the inspiration behind WayUp?

When Liz Wessel, co-founder and CEO of WayUp, was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she was a campus ambassador for Anheuser-Busch, where the company asked if she could help recruit mechanical engineering candidates. Liz was floored that such a big company would reach out to a sophomore, and she realized there was a huge opportunity to help companies recruit straight from college campuses.

What were some issues in the hiring process you thought needed changing?

The college campus recruiting model wasn’t efficient. There were only a handful of people in career services, tasked with supporting thousands of students ready to find an internship, or their first job after graduation. This unbalanced system doesn’t provide students with resources to find jobs suited to their interests, or to discover new opportunities.

Companies can’t visit every college every year, and when they get the chance, it’s usually for career fairs attended by a small portion of the student population, which makes it difficult to target and source for specific roles, especially in STEM and Finance. There had to be a better way to reach, recruit, engage and hire quality early-career candidates.

Why is WayUp a necessary tool for SmartRecruiters customers?

For over 5 million early-career professionals, WayUp is the go-to platform to explore job and internship opportunities, receive advice, and be discovered by employers. Top companies from startups to Fortune 500s use WayUp’s platform to reach, recruit, and engage early-career talent. WayUp students and recent graduates represent over 6,600 campuses in the US, and WayUp’s candidates are currently growing at 35,000 new students and recent graduates per week.

So how does it actually work?

Employers post targeted job listings, invite candidates to apply, and directly message them, all on one platform. We also offer industry-leading employment branding, to help employers build awareness among Gen Z and Millennials.

What does WayUp do that can’t be done through normal job boards?

Where traditional recruiting platforms may focus on years of experience, certifications, and professional networks, WayUp allows students to showcase their personal and professional experience, interests, and areas of study.

For employers, traditional job boards and recruiting marketplaces lead with quantity over quality. They simply don’t satisfy the recruiting funnel for students and recent graduates. WayUp bridges that gap, leading to the highest hiring rate among all early-career recruiting platforms.

How does WayUp make the hiring process as easy as possible?

For every job you post on WayUp, you can apply filters to guarantee only the most appropriate candidates can see the job and apply for it. Employers can directly message and invite individuals to apply.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition?

We feel strongly that opportunity belongs to all. People should never be limited by their economic status, race, sexual orientation, gender, who they know, where they went to school, or where they’re from.

For companies like LinkedIn, the relationship between candidate and customer is a delicate balance, hinged on employer branding and hiring experience.

In an ideal scenario, every employee at your organization is an avid user of your company’s product, and all teams—from sales to development—have a personal investment in its success. Few organizations can make such a claim, but working for a company as ubiquitous as LinkedIn means high probability your employees double as users. The same can be said of the thousands of candidates who apply to work for the networking platform, particularly at the collegiate level, which falls under the jurisdiction of Emily Campana, Director of Global Campus Recruiting.

Since joining in 2011, Emily has worked her way up the LinkedIn ladder, from senior recruiter to her directorial role, and gleaned an intimate look at the company’s brand, values, and social purpose along the way. To learn more about navigating the tricky balance between candidates and customers, we invited Emily to speak at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco.

“We have a strong consumer brand because we have so many members on the platform,” says Campana. By LinkedIn’s recent count, over 575 million—nearly 55 million of whom are college students. “But, we’ve never sat down with marketing and asked ‘what’s our EVP’, or ‘how are we going to build content for that?’ What’s happened has been pretty organic.”

The rest, Campana says, is driven by LinkedIn recruiters. “We teach our recruiters the full story of how LinkedIn came to pass, the company’s values, what we are working on, how we believe we are changing the world, and then really dive into culture and values—we call it master storyteller.” LinkedIn then asks its recruiters to promote the company brand in conversations with candidates, in a way that goes beyond job descriptions.

“Our recruiters spend time with candidates to understand what their motivators are,” says Campana. “Then, we speak to those through our culture, values, organization, and design. This way our recruiters drive the overall brand with our candidates.”

And this step is important for a company whose product is widely recognized, but whose employer brand is not advertised so much. “Our candidates believe that they know a lot about our company because they are users,” explains Campana. “We have to help them understand the consumer side of our business, and we get a lot of suggestions as a result.” And while LinkedIn welcomes critique from users, customers’ understanding of the business is often one-sided.

“Many people believe that we are just a TA product,” says Campana, “but we also have a sales product, a learning product, a marketing product, as well as our broader mission about what LinkedIn does to help empower and make professionals more successful.”

For students preparing to enter the workforce, LinkedIn hosts career-focused events at campuses across the country, where participants can receive help with their profiles, take headshots, and, according to Tey Scott, former Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, “help them land their dream job regardless of our recruiting efforts.”

These day-long development events are held in target cities like Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco—regions with concentrated clusters of universities. By moving away from recruiting at university career fairs—a tactic that only reached about 40 universities per year—LinkedIn adopted a more scalable method that allowed the company to expand its reach to 300+ institutions.

While campus recruiting is just one facet of LinkedIn’s talent strategy, students—primarily Millennials and Gen Zers—are an important demographic for the professional network. And LinkedIn is not alone in targeting the future workforce, with an increasing number of organizations looking at how the next generation’s values and principles directly affect how companies view candidate experience, EVP, and employer branding.

Candidates can share their good or bad experiences across their social media networks, which will likely color their perceptions—as well as those in their network—as customers for LinkedIn’s products and services.

“One of the biggest pieces of our culture and values is ‘members first’,” says Campana. “And since every candidate who comes through our door is a member that’s even more important to us—their experience is not just as a candidates, but also as a LinkedIn member.”