Richard Tuck is the CEO of Riipen, a new Vancouver based company whose tagline reads where students + companies meet.  It’s disruptive, a game changer, and the future of hiring.

Riipen has a unique game plan of using in-class projects to ultimately gain experience in the workplace.  Tell us how the concept started, how did it fructify, and who are the people backing the project?

It’s not a novel concept; experiential learning has been around for decades. What’s novel is the proliferation of need surrounding experiential learning and our ability to provide it – at scale. You see, we have more students going into post-secondary school than ever before, and we have more graduating and not getting jobs. So you have a mass of recent graduates that are underemployed, in debt, living back at home and asking themselves “Was it all worth it?”  We are fast approaching a critical mass of people answering “No!” to that question. So when the co-founders were in their last year of university, and they saw so many peers still working at Starbucks after graduation, they explored the problem. Their research pointed to the experience and skills gaps that existed. As such, they looked back at their 4-year business degree and thought of that one professor who brought a real company into the classroom. The value of that experience, the connection to the CEO, and skills they had to prove to him, were the most valuable experience of their four years. They thought “If there’s an experience gap, and this provides experience, then why didn’t we do more of these?” So that was how Riipen started. It’s the need of the hour. In New York State, the governor passed a law requiring experiential learning for 100% of undergrads, or the students aren’t able to graduate, and the school loses its funding. In Canada, there’s a group that includes the CEO of RBC, who want Canada to adopt a similar plan. We are backed by a couple of Ed-tech investors in the US, we also did an equity crowd-funding so that the mass of students and professors we work with could invest in us, but most of the money has come from Canadian Angels, like the Vice Chair of Deloitte Canada.

 

Like all new things that are not tested and tried out, have you encountered any roadblocks?  How have you tried to circumvent that? What’s your pitch to elicit change?

We believe resumes are dead and that students have to prove they have the skills, interest, and ambition to work for the company. So when their entire infrastructure is bases on resumes, we encounter resistance. To overcome it, we concentrate on the students. We’ve reached a point in history where graduates are twice as more likely to move back at home and live with their parents than they are to get an actual job that required them to go to school. If we do not change, we will have massive economic problems in 10 years. So we try and elicit a sense of urgency—there’s a war going on; we are losing it; and the longer we wait to adopt real change and fix the problem the more recent graduates will become baristas, bartenders and UBER drivers.

Which universities and colleges have embraced Riipen, and why?

The big schools like UBC, Simon Fraser, BCIT, Schulich Business School, Ryerson, Seneca, and Northeastern University in the US, have all embraced Riipen, as well as a bunch of smaller institutions.  They’ve done so for a variety of reasons, most importantly their reputation and future tuitions, especially from international students. You see, if I have a choice of getting a degree from Ryerson or U of T, and one is using Riipen and I get a degree and 15 work experiences between non-profits, start-ups, and big companies like Microsoft, Pepsi, and Kimberly-Clark, which one will students take? They want the work experience that is tied to the degree, the learning, and the knowledge. They should essentially go hand in hand.

How will Riipen help eliminate student unemployment now, or in the future?  Care to illustrate this with case studies?

Riipen eliminates graduate underemployment and unemployment by creating jobs that never would have existed in two ways – the first is direct, the other indirect. Directly, we’ve seen a company like FrontFundr in Vancouver, be the subject of an in-class group project where 5 students have done all sorts of research and understanding around their industry for an entire 3 months of a semester. During that time, one of the 5 students really stuck out as a star. So FrontFundr created a whole co-op position over the summer for her to implement all of the suggestions the group had. That never would have happened. Indirectly, what we’ve seen is that graduates that obtain full employment through a Riipen project, have a much shorter onboarding time and in fact, just like the FrontFundr example, the hire can start providing value for the company as soon as they start. Much less training is involved, so our thesis is that those savings are going to make the companies more competitive and enable them to hire more and more people as they grow.

You have a background in business, then you worked in sales and marketing and then you worked as a Professor. There are two entirely different backgrounds but at the same time there are transferable skills. What worked and what didn’t?

I feel like everything I’ve done in my past has lead to me becoming the CEO of Riipen. All of my experiences are transferable skills that help Riipen impact the lives of thousands of Canadian students.  That being said, I wish I had a degree in Computer Science as well, or take a Brainstation or Lighthouse Labs intensive boot camp.

Since you have a disdain for resumes what can HR change to get the right candidates?

Resumes are generic pieces of paper, which have embellishments on them and so they are a false reflection of the person. They all look the same and, thanks to Monster.com, you get hundreds for every open job. Thankfully their stock price has tanked and no forward-thinking company uses them. Job fairs are the same – no innovations in 60 years. And yet the other option – Riipen – is so simple. The first thing HR has to do is realize that the right candidate doesn’t exist yet. Industry is iterating so fast that academia cannot catch up by itself. So they have two choices: 1) Hire someone unqualified and train them post hire, praying that they’ll actually perform once trained, which becomes a major cost in itself; or 2) Provide skill challenges to students so that the entire generation can become more employable, lowering the cost significantly, while providing more and better data points into who the right candidate really is.  Then you nurture them a little bit more while they are in school.

 

Riipen is a Ed Tech company, as well as a HR Tech company with a strong big data play.  Care to elaborate?

Right now we are in the schools providing meaningful experiential learning at scale. Our focus is on the education and our mission is to eliminate graduate underemployment. We also provide industry with a new, untapped market that no one is talking about. As schools are pressured to open their classrooms, industry will have to follow the rules of the academics in order to get in front of the next generation of employees and consumers. Millennials want authentic engagement, so we are providing the means to do all of this while, in the back end, we are amassing the skills data of these students so that their schools will know if their students are ready for industry, what skills industry values, etc. This is all valuable data for schools and to plan for economic development.  For industry partners, this is invaluable.

Can you give us some real time case examples of Riipen success stories?

MyPakage, a men’s underwear brand, was looking to hire a social media intern over the summer last year. While they were open to receiving resumes, they put in their job ad “if you REALLY want this job, look at our Riipen Project” and provided the link. The received over 120 resumes and yet only 10 people came onto Riipen and did the project.  The project was simple: “Look at our current social media outlets (facebook, twitter, instagram) and give us some ideas of what you would do if you had the job as our social media intern.”  Couple of the submissions really stood out to the Director of Marketing, and so they didn’t even look at a single resume. They called three of the Riipen applicants in for interviews, and hired the best one they thought. Then they looked at his resume – the only work experience he had was at Tim Horton’s, so he would probably have been the first one in the garbage.

 

What does the future of a graduate look like, and what are the statistics of student lives you hope Riipen will touch today, and in the future?

Currently, 42% of youth in their 20s are living back at home; 44% of recent grads are underemployed; 27% go back to school because they feel that their first degree is insufficient to get them a job. Only 26% of graduates believe that their school adequately prepared them for work.  We want all of these to change.  We want students to connect their theory to practice and find relevance in what they are learning. We want students to be exposed to a multitude of work experiences from start-ups to non-profits to multi-nationals to family businesses to find out what they like to do and, more importantly, where they feel they fit best.  We want the next generation of students to not have to take a job because they need to pay bills, only to start looking for another job the day they start. Instead we want them to find the right position at the right company first, and stay there for longer periods of time.

 

Given the scenario of unemployment among educated youth in Canada, is there another vertical in your organization that would address this need? 

Our platform is actually open. While we concentrate on students because it is a focused target market with really great needs and the schools are desperate, anyone facing barriers can use Riipen to look for work. This includes youth, people changing their careers, and immigrants whose credentials aren’t understood by many local companies. These groups face barriers because they cannot articulate their skills – now they have a way to prove that they have the skills by showing them. It’s a different starting point.  We aren’t replacing the entire hiring process, we just strongly believe in a Meritocracy and that the current hiring paradigm is fraught with too much subjectivity and stupidity. Riipen is more efficient and effective, while being better for everyone.

 

Jude Paul Fernandes / jude@thesouthasiannews.com