Discover how the University of Toronto uses a centralized job board to connect students and alumni with 1,000+ university-affiliated startups, driving over 42,000 visits and 3,100 applications annually while showcasing the impact of its entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Network Impact Summary:
The University of Toronto (U of T) boasts one of the most vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystems in North America. There are 12 distinct campus accelerators spanning medicine, engineering, and multiple campuses.
"We're really this connective tissue for twelve different campus accelerators across the university that receive funding from their divisions, their faculties, their campuses," explains Jon French, Director of University of Toronto Entrepreneurship. "They're ultimately accountable to a dean in their faculty and may have their own division-specific objectives”.
But this success created an unexpected problem.
1,000 entrepreneurial teams are supported annually via U of T’s accelerator network and alumni. But when it came to supporting their ability to recruit top talent with job postings, their options were often clunky.
Internal systems are often not built for startups. They lack discoverability, intuitive navigation, and cohesion. UTE needed a way to promote job opportunities externally while providing real value to its startups and accelerator leads.
The entrepreneurship office needed a solution that could:
That’s when they found Getro.
Working with Getro, U of T created a centralized job board that automatically pulls opportunities from active startups across their entire ecosystem. The process is elegantly simple:
"We identify the companies that have some sort of traction, where they're likely to have a job page, they're hiring, they're active, and we'll shrink that list down into the list that we pour into the Getro database."
The platform serves multiple stakeholders:
“The companies on our Getro job board represent the entire ecosystem. It’s beautifully branded, searchable, and acts as a marketing tool and a hiring tool.” – Jon French
Automated Job Scraping: Getro’s job board platform automatically identifies when companies are actively hiring, eliminating manual job posting requirements.
Flexible Company Inclusion: While maintaining strict metrics for reporting (companies must be part of an accelerator, university IP/research, or recent graduates), the job board takes a more inclusive approach to support the broader community, especially when it comes to alumni. Getro makes it simple to add new companies that ask to be added.
Analytics and Reporting: Regular dashboard updates help demonstrate value to university leadership and track ecosystem engagement.
The job board is more than just a recruiting tool; it showcases the university's entrepreneurial impact.
"It really is an advertisement in and of itself to the external ecosystem," Jon explains. "It's external facing, it's public, and it kind of becomes a bit of a calling card for the university because there's such a broad range of startups and positions and verticals and geography."
The platform helps Jon demonstrate value to university leadership: "We've got hundreds and hundreds of these companies that have come through our ecosystem, and they are creating economic impact because they're hiring and social impact. Anything that Getro can do to help me on that front is most welcome."
Since implementing the job board, U of T's entrepreneurship ecosystem has experienced remarkable growth:
"We're happy because it's fairly low maintenance. It's intuitive. We're able to add startups that have emerged from the UT ecosystem and it gives us just like a powerful tool that we can promote," Jon notes.
“The more we can showcase job creation and ecosystem engagement, the better. Getro gives us the tools to do just that.” – Jon French
Book a call with our team to see how you can put your network to work.