GradList Launched At TheNextWeb 2014

Written by Manfred Tropper, Founder of mantro.net

Manfred Tropper, founder of mantro.net

As part of the Boost program at TheNextWeb Europe conference in Amsterdam we introduced our new product ‘GradList’. We chose TheNextWeb Europe for the launch as it’s the perfect place to get in touch with a great variety of people from everywhere around the planet and from a lot of different professions and industries. The feedback was amazing and all our hopes and wishes were more than satisfied. TNW Europe proofed itself to be a get-together of creative and open minds. Our heads are full of new feature ideas whilst our phonebook is full of new contacts. We’ll happily join next year’s conference as well, maybe with an improved version of GradList or even another great startup!

Unleash Your Potential With GradList

The growing complexity of the global job market is placing increasing demands on young academics. Young professionals often have difficulty finding the right employer let alone knowing where their career path is headed. In practice, steep learning curves and the prerequisite of prior professional experience deter many students in their search for suitable employers as these high demands leave them feeling overwhelmed. Countless companies with exciting topics fail to find the right channels for talented young professionals but also lack in adequate expertise, time and money necessary for approaching these talents.

GradList addresses these problems by reinventing the international job market for young professionals!

GradList is a marketplace where students, companies and post-secondary institutions can connect and find their ideal match in terms of interests, preferences and skills. GradList’s simple, transparent and intelligent solution creates a new international standard for networking and cooperating regardless of the parties’ location. Companies can provide potential topics for theses, which students and post-secondary institutions evaluate in terms of their academic potential and, if necessary, revise together with the company in order to satisfy the academic boundary conditions. GradList therefore allows companies and post-secondary institutions to effectively profile themselves and their topics in order to strategically address talented young professionals while students obtain an uncomplicated way of identifying and contacting interesting companies based on matching fields of research and interest – a win-win situation for everyone!

International competition for talented young professionals is on the rise; at the same time, the market is becoming less and less transparent. This has caused prices for recruiting activities to skyrocket. GradList virtually eliminates the need for the costly recruiting process – especially for qualified young professionals. The presence of a previously non-existent level of transparency and a complete lack of a uniform standard will cause the billion-euro business of job boards, recruiting agencies and head-hunters to collapse. GradList will take an iterative approach to charting market specifics in order to continually adapt and improve the services it offers to these markets. This market and customer-friendly approach ensures that we have a very high level of flexibility and are able to quickly develop a good understanding of the market.

GradList will be capable of reaching many more students, companies and universities than an NGO such as AIESEC as it operates independently and entrepreneurially – not on a regional, but an international level. There is currently no specialised international market place for theses. Though job boards like Stepstone, Monster, etc. offer companies the possibility of advertising jobs for thesis topics, the respective ads are not categorised according to research topics and if any matching of companies and candidates (students) does occur, it is of a very rudimentary nature. Universities have been completely neglected in this area so far.

The strong alumni network that will develop on GradList over time offers numerous possibilities for GradList to develop into a highly integrated human resource management tool as well as the leading international market for academic jobs. The collection of data resulting from international interaction between thousands of companies and post-secondary institutions as well as millions of students and alumni will also provide highly relevant trend reports. Currently, these needs are primarily met through the engagement of expensive market and trend research institutes. As GradList collects this data as a “byproduct”, it will also influence the market for trend and market research.

There is a variety of possibilities and methods for monetisation. GradList addresses three target groups. First of all, the fundamental credo that Gradlist will always be free for students and post-secondary institutions applies. Only companies from the private sector will pay for GradList. Based on our price policy, we expect significant growth in the number of users as well as easier access to the academic world whose operations are often under tremendous cost pressure. Once the beta phase is complete, companies will be required to pay in order to post thesis topics. In this context, the price of an individual offer depends on the type of membership the respective company has. Basic memberships do not entail recurrent costs as GradList offers no services other than the publication of offers subject to charge. Additional services such as searching GradList’s database for candidates or access to trend reports may only be used with a premium membership. Premium memberships include a certain number of offers per billing period while further offers are more affordably priced. In addition to these memberships, GradList also provides offers for access to the statistics database. Other monetisation possibilities in the form of marketing, consulting and other services are also available.

About the Author

As a 30 year old serial entrepreneur and founder of mantro.net, an innovation consultancy in Munich, Germany, Manfred Tropper is dedicated to bring new ideas to life, whether for mantro.net’s customers or in the form of startups founded out of mantro.net’s incubator. The idea of GradList, which was presented at TNW 2014, was developed together with mantro.net’s long-term partner Absolute Software in Hamburg. Manfred is responsible for product management and business development and has more than 10 years of experience in innovation projects.