One of the cornerstones of our success is our expansive candidate database of our users—spanning 7,300 universities, colleges, two-year, and technical schools across the country.
We’ve noticed more often than not that potential partners want an inside look into who WayUp’s users are. So, without further ado, here’s the full scoop on who our users are and how we work with them.
How does WayUp classify users?
WayUp has over 7 million users on our platform.
Of the over 7 million users, 5.1 million are sourceable—meaning we can proactively reach out to them with early-career opportunities at any time. The remaining users are considered dormant, either because they have moved beyond the early-career range, or they have unsubscribed or closed their accounts.
Since our founding in 2014, our platform has grown by an average of about 20,000 users every week—which is great news, because as certain cohorts advance in their careers and qualify for more experienced roles available on the platform, newer users take their place for internships and entry-level roles.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll refer most often to our 5.1 million sourceable users, about whom we have a host of self-reported profile data that we use to match great candidates to great opportunities.
What profile information does WayUp have on our candidates?
Candidates are asked to provide the following information when they create an account with or apply to a job on WayUp. Some of this is optional (such as demographic data) and some of this is required (such as name and email):
- Basic Contact Info (Name, Email Phone Number)
- Resume
- Profile Picture
- Education Details (Graduation Date, Major, School, Degree Type, GPA)
- Job, Internship, and Volunteer History
- Ethnicity, Gender, Veteran or Disability Status
- Skills and Interests
- Location
- Links to Social Profiles (LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter)
- Personal Touches like “About Me” and a “Fun Fact”
All data is self-reported by users, especially demographic details which are collected in accordance with OFCCP/EEOC guidelines. Since all user data is self-reported, when we refer to sourceable users in this article for specific attributes we are referring to those users who have provided us with that information.
What’s the demographic breakdown of WayUp’s candidates?
For Sourceable users who elect to provide us with demographic information, it breaks down as follows.
In addition, we’re proud of the fact that at least 65,000 of our candidates are former or active military service members. WayUp is supportive of all veterans, especially those who are looking for their first civilian career opportunities.
Which schools do WayUp candidates attend?
If you look at a heatmap of where current students and recent college graduates live in the US, it looks very similar to the heatmap of WayUp’s user base.
Our users represent over 7,300 campuses, a number which includes four-year, two-year, technical/vocational, and distance/online schools. It also is inclusive of individual campus locations for large institutions to make it easier for us to source students and recent grads from specific areas. We are strongest at four-year institutions with 77% of our users attending or having graduated from these schools.
The campuses from which we have the most students or graduates tend to be—unsurprisingly—the largest schools in the country. For example, we have more than 35,000 users from NYU, 27,000 users from Rutgers, 17,000 users from University of Texas at Austin, and so on. In fact, the list of most attended universities overlaps very closely with our top schools on the platform.
The most important thing to know is that at WayUp, we focus on helping companies hire diverse and qualified candidates. What this means is that we’re less focused on gaining one hundred percent penetration at specific schools, and more interested in getting the right people at different schools to be on WayUp. This is especially important for WayUp clients with “core schools.” When that’s the case, they can always tell us to avoid (or double down on!) that list to expand their access to the most qualified candidates.
In short, we have users who attend or graduated from almost every four- and two-year college or university in the United States.
We also have a strong contingent of users who attend or have graduated from each of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the country. If you name a school, we almost definitely have representation there.
To find out about our representation at specific schools, email us at engage@wayup.com.
What is the educational profile of WayUp candidates?
Working hand-in-hand with our Customer Success managers, our clients can target the students whose educational profiles best match the role they’re looking for. This doesn’t just include school, but other valuable information like Major, Degree Type, Graduation Year, and where candidates are in their careers (something we call Career Status).
At WayUp, our users study over 900 Majors—allowing recruiters to reach a highly diverse audience with a broad range of skill sets and interests.
For convenience, we organize our Majors into 44 distinct Major Categories in our own proprietary taxonomy, which makes it easier for recruiters to search for candidates pursuing multiple related majors at once. We’ll frequently source based on related Major Categories that speak to the skill set required for a specific role.
Overall, 38% of our sourceable users have “STEM” (Engineering, Mathematics, etc) category majors, and 32% have “Business” (Business, Marketing, etc) category majors. Listed in the chart below are the top 5 specific majors WayUp candidates have, multiple specific majors with similar skillsets are combined to create the 44 major categories we use:
Where are WayUp candidates located?
We often get asked where our users are, and to us, that’s a complicated question. For many of our users, we gather three pieces of distinct, self-reported location information:
- Their Current Location
- Their Hometown Location
- Their Campus Location (Where They Attend or Have Graduated from School)
Our in-house analytics team can also see:
- Where users are searching for jobs
- Where users are applying to jobs
This is important data, because, for example, there are people who may be from New York, whose family moved to Florida, and therefore may be looking to move to Florida. Hence, we really emphasize where our users are searching for jobs.
Which users our clients reach out to about their roles is highly dependent on the type of role and its requirements, the willingness of candidates to relocate or work remotely, and the location of the role itself. In fact, 69% of job applications on our platform are submitted by users who are located in a different city than that of the job posting—so we recommend that recruiting teams do not use a strict candidate location to strategize sourcing for a role.
On the other hand, when evaluating a vendor, often recruiting teams like to have a high-level view of which users they can reliably target using the platform. So, for maximum transparency, we like to help our prospective partners fully understand the recruiting landscape on WayUp.
Here are five useful stats about the number of users present in a few key markets. These numbers are based on users who have searched for or applied to early-career roles in these areas, assuming a maximum 65-mile commuting radius.
- New York City: 735K
- San Francisco 347K
- Baltimore: 330K
- Boston: 415K
- Philadelphia: 377K
If you’d like to understand our user engagement for your target market(s), please reach out to us at engage@wayup.com to learn more.
Are there any candidates WayUp doesn’t have on the platform?
There are several types of users we don’t target to join WayUp, mostly because we haven’t established ourselves in certain niche fields that require a particular level of focus. We want to make sure the candidates we do work with have a great early-career job search experience, and we aren’t able to provide that level of service to some users yet, but we’re working on it!
So while many of the following types of users are on our platform, they have all been acquired organically, and we do not actively recruit them:
- Medical and Law Students
- Nursing Students or students who want to go into Nursing
- Candidates who attend or attended a college or university outside of the United States
- High School graduates not pursuing a secondary degree
If you have any more questions about our candidates—or WayUp in general—please fill out the form below or contact us at engage@wayup.com.
If you’re interested in learning more about early-career recruitment, visit our content library.
