WayUp
Winter 2015AcquiredMarketplace for employers to recruit college students and recent grads
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Marketplace for employers to recruit college students and recent grads
Explore the risks and possibilities with a prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
WayUp matched college students and recent graduates with internships and entry-level jobs, giving employers a digital alternative to a campus-by-campus recruiting tour. Liz Wessel and JJ Fliegelman started it as The Campus Job in 2014 and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch.[1]
Yello acquired WayUp in July 2021 and later renamed the employer product Yello Sourcing. WayUp owned candidate reach; Yello owned campus recruiting workflow, events, and evaluation. The combination joined marketplace supply with recruiter software.[2]
Wessel first noticed the broken campus market when Anheuser-Busch asked her, then a Penn sophomore, to recruit mechanical-engineering students as a campus ambassador. She wondered why a large company needed a student intermediary.[3]
She built an earlier project for campus ambassador jobs, then went to Google after graduation. At Google, she saw the other side: recruiters faced huge applicant volume but struggled to find quality and broaden access.[4]
Wessel found Fliegelman by accessing a Penn hackathon signup list, reading the applicants, and inviting the strongest engineer to meet at City Tap House. He knew her “friends recommended you” story was invented, but met anyway.[1]
The Campus Job widened from part-time work to internships and full-time roles, making its name inaccurate. “The Campus Job doesn't make sense,” Wessel explained, because it implied only school-year part-time jobs.[5] WayUp let the product follow graduates beyond campus.
Students created profiles with education, work, interests, skills, hobbies, and other experience that a conventional résumé might discount. Matching software suggested roles and let qualified candidates apply through employer systems without leaving WayUp.[3]
Employers bought access to early-career candidates beyond the schools they visited. WayUp added career advice, employer branding, candidate sourcing, and a diversity-focused recruiting product. Its candidate network crossed thousands of universities, including minority-serving institutions.
The marketplace addressed two kinds of scarcity. Students lacked work history and insider connections. Recruiters lacked an efficient way to find relevant candidates across many campuses. WayUp translated nontraditional experience into searchable evidence and moved early screening online.
WayUp served students and people with zero to five years of experience. Employers ranged from startups to large campus programs seeking internships and first jobs.
WayUp reached 3.5 million profiles by 2017 and nearly 7 million users by 2022.[3][7] These are user totals, not active job seekers or hires.
Handshake had deep university distribution. LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor had broad employer and candidate reach. Campus career centers held institutional relationships. WayUp competed through direct candidate acquisition, early-career focus, and employer diversity sourcing.
Yello approached from recruiter operations. Its software covered events, evaluation, and the campus recruiting lifecycle, but it needed candidate supply beyond scheduled events. Buying WayUp closed that gap.
Employers paid for sourcing, branding, and recruiting tools; candidates used the marketplace. The company raised $27.5 million by 2017.[3] Public sources do not disclose revenue, pricing, retention, acquisition price, or investor returns.
The model depended on candidate attention and employer results. A large profile count attracted recruiters only if enough users were current, qualified, and responsive. Employer contracts funded acquisition and content, but recruiting demand varied with hiring cycles.
Yello reported nearly 7 million users a year after acquisition, with jobs posted up 173% and applications up 86% year over year in the first half of 2022.[7] The buyer also reported 388% customer growth. None of those figures isolates hires or WayUp revenue.
WayUp digitized early-career supply. Yet recruiters still had to plan events, manage interview stages, evaluate candidates, and coordinate offers. The marketplace owned the top of funnel, while Yello owned the operating system around it.
The companies addressed complementary gaps through acquisition. Yello could source candidates outside events; WayUp could sit inside an end-to-end recruiter process.
WayUp understood that first-time applicants need different profiles and advice. That focus built trust, but users aged out. The company renamed itself to follow students into full-time work, though extending far into later careers would have brought direct competition with LinkedIn and general job boards.
WayUp reported record sales before the 2021 deal, while Yello had built virtual recruiting tools during COVID-19. Remote recruiting weakened the campus event as the sole distribution channel. Combining a national candidate network with virtual workflow was a logical response, not evidence of collapse.[8]