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It’s hard to get a job fresh out of college—doubly so if you’re graduating from an underthe-radar school or don’t have plugged-in parents. Garrett Lord built Handshake to help. His LinkedIn for college kids has raised more than $400 million and signed up 1,400 schools with 12 million students. But can it survive if companies start firing, not hiring?
For the computer science major from Michigan Technological University, located in the small Upper Peninsula town of Houghton, a job at the CIAbacked company was a ticket to the big leagues. Sweet gigs at VCbacked software unicorns, complete with high salaries and equity grants, were sure to follow.
Days after arriving at Palantir’s Washington, D.C., office in May 2012, though, the 6foot1 Midwesterner had serious selfdoubts. The 15 other interns seemed to hail from a different universe. They all attended brandname schools and spent much of their time chatting about their highend research projects or bragging about upcoming European vacations. Lord’s only trip out of the U.S. was to nearby Canada for a hockey tournament when he was a young teen.
“I remember calling my dad and he said, ‘You might not be smarter than them, but I do know one thing: You’re not going to blow this opportunity, and you will work harder than them,’ ” Lord, now 33, recalls. Rather than retreat, he decided he was “gonna crush it” and prove he could “hang with all these kids.”
Crush it he did. He won the company’s annual hackathon and gained the respect of Palantir higherups, who, he says, were shocked that someone so smart and talented came from such a littleknown school. They offered him a referral bonus—$5,000 per hired engineer—to bring in other talented students from Michigan Tech.
That’s when the light bulb lit up: What if Lord could create software to connect talenthungry companies to the thousands of students across the country at lowerprofile schools like Michigan Tech? “There are talented students everywhere. And what Zip code you grew up in shouldn’t define the career outcome you have after college,” he says. “At Michigan Tech, we weren’t seen.”
So when he returned to campus that fall, he teamed up with two compsci buddies, Ben Christensen and Scott Ringwelski, and got to work. The three undergrads envisioned an easytouse, mobilefirst networking platform to virtually connect students, universities and employers. They launched Handshake two years later in 2014 and were featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2017.
Today nearly 12 million college students (many with little or no job experience) from 1,400 colleges and universities around the U.S. use the platform to search job postings from 750,000 companies, message with recruiters and alumni, attend virtual career fairs and conduct video interviews. The students don’t pay a dime, but their schools pay an average of $8,000 a year. The 1,110 companies that pay for a premium version of the platform dish out even more: anywhere from $15,000 to several million dollars a year, which enables them to send targeted job postings to candidates based on their current location, gender, underrepresented group status, major, GPA, specific skills (such as JavaScript or Python coding) or school—for instance, letting them market to historically Black colleges or universities (HBCUs). (Employers can also use all of these segments, except race and gender, to search for individual candidates.)
Handshake’s growth has been supercharged by a tight labor market and the move to virtual hiring and remote work during the pandemic. The number of students who “handshake”—it has morphed into a verb on college campuses—is up 600% since 2017, when just 1.6 million students were on the platform. Revenue will hit $120 million in 2022, according to Lord, up from $75 million last year and $3 million five years ago. Handshake, which has yet to turn a profit, raised $200 million in January from investors including Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins and Coatue Management. That round brought its total fund
At age 22, Garrett Lord accomplished the nearimpossible: Without the advantages of attending an elite school like Stanford or MIT, or a built-in network bequeathed by wealthy parents, he managed to cold-call (well, cold-email) his way into a summer internship at Palantir, then one of Silicon Valley’s hottest data-mining startups.