Careero

Today I crossed 100 RSVP's for our virtual career fair for the social impact career fair.

The vast majority of signups have come from university students who are looking for internships or entry-level full-time positions.

Of those students, most have come from a drip campaign I set up that included the presidents of many student clubs, asking them to forward a quick blurb about the event to their members.

It took me ~10 days to reach 100 signups. My hope is that it will take me 5 days to reach 200.

Today I spent time writing an article that I shared on Medium and LinkedIn announcing why I was launching a virtual career fair for social impact careers.

I wanted to get these out as soon as possible so that I could no longer put this project off. Now that it's announced and the dates are published, it has to happen! I think that added sense of accountability will help a lot.

The other day, I was reading a report from Y Combinator about their top 100 companies in 2019. Of the companies on that list, 51% were B2B SaaS products. (For those of you who don’t speak tech. B2B = business to business and SaaS = software as a service. Think of Quickbooks or Salesforce — really boring software that helps businesses automate things) 3% of the companies were education and 1% were focused on environmental sustainability.

After reading the report, I shared it with a few friends and jokingly said: “The world might be burning down, but thank god medium to large businesses will still be operating efficiently.”

That report surfaced something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few months: the world has a bunch of upcoming challenges that need to be solved, all of which are difficult, but solvable if we have enough people devoted to working on them. However, if we have so many of our smartest people working on software that gets more clicks, views, engagement, etc etc — I’m not confident in our ability to get there.

This is where the virtual career fair comes in. I hope that in organizing this event, I can show folks how many really awesome organizations are out there who are trying to solve really difficult problems. I want to encourage the world’s best and brightest to work on more important challenges.

Our first upcoming virtual career fair will be the internet’s first (and largest) career fair for social impact companies. It will take place December 5–8th (it’s free for both students and companies to attend).

The conference includes talks from rockstar professionals, virtual mentoring sessions, and job/internship opportunities at world-saving companies. We’ll have hiring employers who are all working on solving at least one of the following causes:

• Fighting climate change
• Improving access to education
• Fixing healthcare
• Reducing poverty
• Helping urban mobility
• Protecting civil liberties