Amazon, JPMorgan Chase looking for talent beyond ‘college graduate pond’: Gerald Chertavian
Year Up Founder & CEO, Gerald Chertavian, joins 'Influencers with Andy Serwer' to discuss what corporations are doing to address America's opportunity gap.
Video Transcript
ANDY SERWER: Your group works with corporate partners like Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and Uber. What do those relationships entail?
GERALD CHERTAVIAN: So, many companies, at the end of the day, talent is always on your top five list, right? Accessing and gaining access to good talent. So the companies we work with are recognizing that if you only fish in the BA pond, right, the college graduate plus pond, that actually will not ultimately provide you with all the talent that you'll need to grow and sustain your organization.
So companies work with Year Up, whether it's an Amazon or a Bank of America, a JP Morgan, because we have great talent, right? We can provide those organizations with a source of relevant and valuable talent that now measures in the thousands. So, alone, goodness, Bank of America took 500 interns from Year Up last year. So these are significant relationships where we can plan together to help an organization to grow its talent base. We happen to serve young adults who are all low income and 94% of color.
But actually, what we're saying to corporate America is, we have a source of talent that you perhaps haven't tapped into in the past. We're going to provide you with that opportunity to see those young people, to experience what they can offer, and you have the opportunity to hire them into your companies full-time. So this is not a charitable act in and of itself. It clearly is good for the community. It creates a healthy community around a business when people have access to economic mobility.
But our partners do this because they want relevant, valuable talent to be the best companies they can be. And those who are our best relationships, those are the ones that continue to grow and prosper when we are a channel and an access to young adults that they haven't had access to in the past.
