Julia Haber, the 29-year-old co-founder of career platform Home From College, was a student at Syracuse University when she started her first business: an experiential marketing agency that brought retail pop-ups to college campuses and worked with brands like Shopify to teach students about entrepreneurship.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Home From College. Julia Haber.
The experience gave Haber valuable insight into what the career landscape looks like for Gen Z — and just how much it had changed over the past six-plus years.
“ This next generation is constantly looking for ways to figure out who they are by doing things,” Haber tells Entrepreneur, “and because it’s such a socially native generation, we see all these people online making money in different ways. This next gen really wants to work with brands they love as well and admire, and it’s a blend of this consumer meets career.”
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Recognizing that many students graduate without knowing what they want to do with their lives — and often with significant debt — Haber wanted to help them build “multi-hyphenate” careers early on.
So Haber launched the Los Angeles-based startup Home From College in 2021 alongside co-founder Kaj Zandvliet, a former banker at PineBridge Investments and financial analyst at Sony Music Entertainment.
“We position ourselves as the translator between companies and college students.”
Home From College provides students with an opportunity to earn their first dollars and work with the brands they love in a “flexible, student-first” environment.
To that end, Home From College only hosts paid job opportunities, 90% of which are remote. Companies can create an account on the platform and list their “gigs,” which could be anything from a one-day project to a lengthier brand ambassador program. Students and recent graduates create their own accounts on the platform and apply for the gigs that interest them — no prior work experience required.
Home From College is free for students to use. The platform offers four subscription tiers for companies, starting at $49 per month, plus a 20% fee on student compensation. All payments take place on the platform via Stripe.
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Students typically earn about $30 an hour, and the average ambassador program pays students roughly $1,000 a month. It’s also common for students to work two gigs at once. Some of the top earners have seen “tens of thousands of dollars in a short period of time,” Haber notes — with one dedicated student’s gigs even amounting to a $50,000 paycheck.
“We position ourselves as the translator between companies and college students, and that really resonated,” Haber says.
Home From College raised $1.5 million of pre-seed funding in 2022, then $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV, formerly Google Ventures, last year.
The company is using those funds to continue building a “sustainable, fast-moving” business. Home From College has invested in high-level talent and AI to connect students and brands effectively.
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“We’ve been implementing a ton of new roles that have more of an AI bent to them.”
Additionally, although Home From College initially focused on low- to no-skilled jobs, there’s an interesting opportunity to lean on the hard skills that Gen Z college students and recent graduates often already have — like those related to AI, Haber says.
“We’ve been implementing a ton of new roles that have more of an AI bent to them,” Haber explains, “and helping companies catch up to the students who are already native [in AI]. So that’s been a new frontier of actually having the students be more of the experts in a topic that companies are less proficient in and helping bridge that gap.”
Companies on the platform are also interested in students with a talent for customer success and sales at scale, Haber says.
For example, some consumer brands look to students for help with distribution in challenging markets, like the outskirts of a college campus or the middle of the country. It’s typical for these companies to recruit students to source new locations, such as a nearby deli, to sell products.
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“ So it’s creating almost a business development sales team, boots on the ground at scale, where they can hire hundreds of people for that type of role,” Haber says, “where it’s skill and labor, and then simultaneously social media and content.”
Brands often rely on students to run their TikTok shops too, as it can be a massive undertaking for those that want to launch and scale a meaningful affiliate program, Haber notes.
“[Students] come in and run those programs on behalf of companies,” Haber says, “and it’s great because it helps generate revenue for their business, but simultaneously teaches [the students] marketable skills.”
“You’re not just where you went to school. You’re a bigger version of that.”
Above all, Haber encourages young adults launching their careers to “use your whole self as the opportunity to market who you are” and land the role you want.
Home From College facilitates that by allowing students to share more information about themselves than a typical resume or job application might glean — for instance, having curly hair could make them “really attractive” to a shampoo brand that specializes in curls and needs a social media manager to connect with its target customer base.
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“You’re not just your major,” Haber says. “You’re not just what your GPA is. You’re not just where you went to school. You’re a bigger version of that.”
This article is part of our ongoing series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a Young Entrepreneur®.
