Get your career cracking with TalentEgg

When she first graduated from Queen's University in 2005, Lauren Friese did what many graduates in her shoes do.  She went to graduate school.  Ms. Friese ended up at the London School of Economics in London, England.  After graduation she found a job there through Milkround.com. 

Milkround.com is a British-based website focused on helping graduates find meaningful career opportunities.

After a year, Ms. Friese returned to Toronto and found that there was not a comparable website serving the Canadian marketplace.  Thus, the seed for TalentEgg was sown.

TalentEgg is an online resource where students can go to figure out what they want to do, where they want to do it, and how they can get there.    Furthermore, it is also a welcomed tool for many "former" campus recruiters.  Ms. Friese explains, "We do this by offering employers an efficient way to communicate their recruitment message to students and recent grads.  Think of it like a campus career centre with national scale."

TalentEgg's business model presently focuses on recruitment ads rather than traditional display advertising.  Ms. Friese's business is based on "working with employers who see value in communicating their recruitment messages.  However, the key thing is that our audience comes to TalentEgg for the purpose of interacting with those recruitment ads." 

(In fact, Ms. Friese is so passionate about this that she sees this as the key to the survival of media:  "If it's (media) going to continue being a business, which it has to be able to survive...is that companies are going to have to figure out a way to provide value to advertisers as well as viewers")

So far, Ms. Friese is seeing great results.  "We hear from employers all the time that they're hiring tons of people through us and seeing great results in general."

TalentEgg also features a Facebook Fan Page which aggregates many articles from the sites two main social features: Launch, which calls itself a (online) lifestyle magazine for students and recent grads and Incubator, which provides tips from how to create a "career launching resume" to how to network.

While TalentEgg and it's social content and business model may not be a new idea in the marketplace it does play to Ms. Friese's strengths.  Her experience in England taught her that Canadian graduates deserved a better online service.  "I recently had a chat with Michael Hyatt of Blue Cat Networks.  The advice that stuck out the most was, 'Know what you want.'  I think that is so important for tech entrepreneurs.  Now that there's so much fantastic technology out there, lots of upcoming tech entrepreneurs should consider leveraging existing technology to create a business."

So instead of reinventing the wheel, TalentEgg purpose is to leverage existing wheels, so to speak.  By harnessing social media, networks, community and a sound business model, Lauren Friese has created a site that is taking advantage of today's marketplace: Companies and the great talent they want to hire are hanging out online.  TalentEgg just brings them together.