Garrett Lord is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, a career platform for Gen Z and early-career talent. Garrett and his co-founders started the company in college, after experiencing the challenges of transitioning from school to the workforce—and seeing how barriers to employment affected students unequally.
“Forty-three percent of college students graduate unemployed,” says Garrett. “So much about that challenge is really correlated with what do your parents do, what school did you go to, and what ZIP code did you grow up in.”
Handshake has grown dramatically since its founding in 2014, and it is now the leading early-career talent network. The platform connects ~1m employers with 15 million students and young alumni around the world, from 1,500+ educational institutions. That includes four-year colleges, community colleges, boot camps, and more than 350 minority-serving institutions.
Talent is everywhere. But what is not available in America is opportunity everywhere. That’s where a nationwide network like Handshake is making a big dent.
Garrett began forming the idea for Handshake after experiencing how factors unrelated to talent or potential affected career prospects. He studied at a community college before attending Michigan Technological University, located in Michigan’s upper Peninsula, which is roughly seven hours from Chicago and nine hours from Detroit. That distance made securing jobs in major city hubs difficult as employers did not travel to host recruiting events at his school.
Thanks to persistent cold-calling and the mentorship of a professor, he was able to secure a competitive internship at Palantir Technologies. There, he encountered students from Ivy League schools for the first time and was surprised to learn that at these schools, competitive Fortune 100 companies like Palantir and Google were coming to their campuses to host career fairs to recruit students.
He also saw how personal connections could sway job prospects. “Who your parents are and what they do shouldn’t define whether or not you get a job,” he says.
He and his co-founders, Ben Christensen and Scott Ringwelski road-tripped across the U.S. after graduation to understand the challenges students faced at campuses around the country. “We started to put together the dots: that the problems we had seen were only more real on other campuses.”
Garrett recalls sleeping in his Ford Focus in McDonald’s parking lots and showering in university gym locker rooms. Through these tough times, he was fueled by the mission of Handshake: to democratize opportunity, and help people start, jumpstart, or restart their careers. Through this road trip, they aimed to make as many in-person connections at as many colleges and universities as they could to start building a wide-reaching network. They signed up five university career centers in the first six months to connect students to their dream employers.
Handshake has helped shift the hiring paradigm at major companies. Take General Motors: The car company used to recruit at only 18 schools, but now, in partnership with Handshake, draws talent from more than 750 schools.
“That’s really beautiful,” says Garrett. “Companies believe nowadays that talent is evenly distributed. Talent is everywhere. But what is not available in America is opportunity everywhere. That’s where a nationwide network like Handshake is making a big dent.”
