We Built Something.

Hey!

Ford here.

Over the last several months, I have written about the early-career hiring crisis from every angle. The entry-level job market at its worst in 37 years. Career services offices with 8 advisors for 30,000 students. Universities reporting placement rates built on self-selected surveys while 52% of their graduates land in jobs that don't require their degree. Students applying to 300, 400, 500 jobs and hearing back from two.

I have been building toward something the whole time. Today I want to tell you what it is.

The three things I believe are true

First: Career services owns the outcome metric but not the upstream data. By the time they know a student is struggling, that student has usually already disappeared from the system.

Second: Career services cannot fix this at scale with the staffing and tools it currently has. The most dedicated advisor in the world cannot close the gap when they are responsible for thousands of students and flying blind on everything that happens before graduation day.

Third: The data universities report on student outcomes is not real. It is a survey response rate. The graduates who are underemployed, working in jobs that have nothing to do with their degree, carrying debt that made sense against a salary they never earned, are the least likely to fill out the form.

These are not criticisms. They are design constraints. And design constraints have solutions.

What we built

We built a platform called Runway.

Here is what it does, simply: it monitors 175,000+ company career sites in real time, calculates a student's actual fit for every role, and surfaces only the jobs where they are genuinely competitive. For each match, it delivers a complete playbook for getting that job - how to tailor your resume, personalized interview prep built around that specific company, and the exact people to reach out to inside that organization.

The thesis is the same one I have been writing about for months. Apply to fewer jobs. Apply early. Apply where you actually fit. Do the preparation that makes you stand out.

33,000 students are using Runway right now.

Our average user sees a 10% interview rate. The industry average on platforms like LinkedIn and Handshake is 1%.

Our users are getting interviews at Goldman Sachs, Google, Deloitte, McKinsey, Amazon, Jane Street, Ramp, Anthropic, and hundreds of companies in between. Not because they have better resumes than everyone else. Because they are applying to the right roles at the right time with the right preparation.

What we are not

We are not a Handshake/Symplicity/12twenty competitor. These are operations platform. It runs career fairs, manages employer relationships, handles appointment scheduling. Career services needs it and should keep it.

We are not a resume tool. We are not an interview prep tool. We are not another aggregated job board with a slightly better algorithm.

We are the thing that sits where these operations platforms were never built to go: the actual job search, from match to offer. Every step, for every student, built around the specific job in front of them.

What the data tells us is possible

Here is the number that drives everything we do.

Graduates who have at least one internship are 48.5% less likely to be underemployed after graduation. Not slightly less likely. Nearly half as likely.

The single most important intervention in a student's career outcome is getting them into meaningful work experience before they graduate. Not a better resume template. Not a career fair. An internship. A real one, at a company that challenges them, early enough to matter.

Everything Runway does is optimized to get students to that experience faster and to prepare them to make the most of it once they get there.

What we are looking for

We are looking for university design partners.

Not customers. Not pilot accounts. Design partners. Institutions that want to sit at the table with us, tell us what their students actually need, and help shape what this becomes.

Here is what that means in practice. You are not buying a license to an off-the-shelf tool. You are co-designing something built around your students, your outcomes, and your vision for what career readiness looks like at your institution.

Every university is different. Your students have different backgrounds, different industries they are heading into, different gaps between where they are and where they want to go. The design partnership is how we learn that together and how Runway becomes something that reflects your school rather than something generic layered on top of it.

We have talked to over 70 career services offices. We know what the Handshake-plus-VMock-plus-BigInterview stack looks like. We know what the bandwidth constraints feel like from the inside. We are not coming in with a vendor pitch. We are coming in with a question: what would it look like if your students actually had a fighting chance in this market?

The 25-year version of this

I want to be honest about what I think is possible.

The problem with how universities are measured right now is that they report their own outcomes, the same way no public company audits its own financials. The data is soft. The incentives are misaligned. And the graduates who are struggling are invisible to the system that was supposed to help them.

The version of this I am building toward is a world where every graduate's actual career outcome is tracked, verified, and tied back to the institution that prepared them. Where universities are only considered successful when their graduates land work that matches their potential. Where the contract between a student and a school means something past graduation day.

That is not a product announcement. That is a direction. And the institutions that want to get there before everyone else is forced to are the ones I want to build with.

If that is you, hit reply. Tell me about your students, your team, and what you are trying to fix. We will figure out the rest from there.

Keep progressing,

Ford Coleman 
Founder & CEO, Runway

P.S. If you know a career services director, a dean, or a university administrator who is serious about student outcomes, forward this to them. This is the conversation that needs to happen.