On April 4, Elliot Carlson ’23 and Jacob Gliedman ’23 won the live virtual final round of Hamilton’s annual Pitch Competition and were awarded $20,000 for their career services platform RAIN. The seven-month long entrepreneurial competition began in September, where participants submitted a two-minute video pitch of their idea. Throughout October and early November, teams met with a variety of mentors and notable speakers. In late November and December, teams were matched with mentors, who advised them on their concepts, and submitted their first rounds of pitch decks. In January, final pitch presentations were recorded for review by a panel of Hamilton alumni. These judges later evaluated the submissions and selected three finalists.
The initial idea for RAIN came about during the spring of Carlson and Gliedman’s junior year as they applied for summer internships in finance. They were both studying abroad at the Stockholm School of Economics at the time and began talking about the job recruitment process with each other.
They found the career services industry to be extremely fragmented, with very few platforms servicing more than one step of the process. There was no consolidated tool that students could use to apply for jobs and internships. Gliedman recalls Carlson turning to him and asking, “I wonder if we could create something where we could aggregate all of these different [sites]?” They began researching job recruitment tools that currently exist in the market, and the beginnings of RAIN were born.
RAIN covers every step of the job search process through personalized job searching, resumé and cover letter building, networking, application trackers and interview preparation. Instead of having to manage the job application process through a number of separate websites, RAIN consolidates it into one place that keeps you on track with automated to-do lists, reminders and individualized portals for each application.
Carlson and Gliedman found Hamilton’s emphasis on speaking, presenting and communicating effectively to be invaluable during the pitch competition. Their experiences pursuing economics concentrations provided them with a strong financial background and business perspective that helped them build the business model of RAIN. The statistics and computer science classes Gliedman has taken at Hamilton provided him with experience working with a team and presenting data. Carlson’s other concentration in art gave him the opportunity to put his web design skills to use while making RAIN’s user interface visually appealing and comprehensive. He says this creative aspect of his academic experience at Hamilton taught him how to “bring [an idea] from the bottom and create it into something that is way bigger than what it started as.”
The winning team adjusted their schedules this year to make the development of RAIN a priority. Gliedman took an independent study in the data science department with Professor Chinthaka Kuruwita to work on the data collection and analytics side of the platform. Carlson took an independent study in the Art department with Professor Ella Gant on the RAIN wireframe and UX/UI design. Their pitch competition mentors, Margaret Bacheler ’93 and David Lahey ’83, brought their business expertise to RAIN by assisting Gliedman and Carlson in forming a long-term plan that divided the project up into manageable steps. Gliedman noted that the mentors had complementary skill sets, with Lahey having experience in building his own business and Bacheler using her experience as an angel capital investor to help the team determine how to best present their idea.
Over the course of the pitch competition, Carlson and Gliedman incorporated two other groups from the job recruitment ecosystem into their product: employers and college career centers. From conversations with Hamilton’s Career Center, other career centers in the area and students at other schools, they were able to better recognize the value that those two groups added to RAIN. RAIN helps to prevent career advisors from being spread thin by managing a large number of students, and the platform provides candidate engagement tracking and qualitative data to help employers find better matches. Carlson and Gliedman have met with almost every employee at the Career Center and say everyone definitely recognizes the value RAIN holds for both students and Career centers. The team is also establishing relationships with schools such as Colgate University, SUNY Binghamton, Utica University and SUNY Oneonta. As for the future of RAIN, Carlson and Gliedman plan on continuing to conduct market research and refining the platform to establish a strong user base of students and schools.
