Briefcase mobile, LinkedIn upgrades are ready for back-to-school season

It’s not quite back-to-school season yet, but Kansas City-based startup career finding Briefcase is getting a new look and a few new ways to interact with its users.

Briefcase aims to give students and their school’s career services office effective tools to conduct job searches.

It’s not quite back-to-school season yet, but Kansas City-based startup career finding Briefcase is getting a new look and a few new ways to interact with its users. 

After a pilot program this spring at four local universities—the Trulaske College of Business at the University of Missouri­–Columbia, the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, the Helzberg School of Management at Rockhurst University and Park University—Briefcase’s team is taking what they learned to make their product even better.  

“Version two was about taking what we learned from the students and making a few changes, redesigning it so it looks a lot better and adding in all those different career service features they can’t live without,” co-founder and COO Caleb Phillippi told SPN. 

Briefcase gives students and their school’s career services office effective tools to conduct job searches and analyze the results. Currently the platform is only available via web, but when the new version goes live in August it also will have a mobile app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

Once a college or university licenses Briefcase, its students have full access to both the online and mobile app versions of the startup’s platform as well as all of the features it offers. 

“We are trying to stay minimalistic and maybe adding a few things nobody else is doing,” Phillippi said.

“Paper resumes are going out the door”

One of those things is a one-click application feature that allows students to submit a resume for a job opening without ever leaving the Briefcase platform. 

“We’re trying to lead the way, driving home the fact, especially to the marketplace, that traditional paper resumes are going out the door,” Briefcase co-founder and CTO Nick Mallare said. “That’s kind of what our product revolves around, going completely digital and paperless.”

To help make that process even more seamless, Briefcase has added integrations with LinkedIn so that students have to manually input as little information as possible. 

“One of our biggest additions is the ability to connect (students’) LinkedIn accounts to the platform,” Mallare said. “They can just import their LinkedIn profile and it translates into a resume in our system.”

But Briefcase, which was part of the inaugural SparkLabKC class, is trying to ease some job application pain on the administrative side as well. The new version of Briefcase will offer a career service admin dashboard to view an overview of students’ activities on the Briefcase platform, while also being able to track a single student’s individual job search process.

 

Read more about Briefcase through our previous coverage: “Briefcase opens to all Rockhurst students, adds three other schools

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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