Communications of the ACM
The Social Network Employers Love to Raid
Piazza Technologies Inc. is a stealth company—largely unknown by the general public but familiar to almost anyone who's studied computer science in the past few years. Some 2.5 million students use its free website to ask and answer one another's questions about computers, engineering, math, and science, all under the supervision of their professors. Seven years in, Piazza says 98 percent of computer science students at the top 50 universities access its site; students report using it on average for at least three hours a day.
Now the Palo Alto company is doing the obvious thing—monetizing all those eyeballs. In late 2016 the company launched Piazza Careers. Companies pay for access to students who opt in; they can see professors' evaluations of the students' participation on the site, and they can narrow searches to, say, teaching assistants for artificial intelligence classes who are graduating in 2018.
Piazza says 90 percent of the messages companies send to students get opened. The career feature is particularly appealing to companies that need tech talent but aren't necessarily on students' radar. So far, 80 are on board.
From Bloomberg
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