SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Handshake, the leading platform for college students to find a job and get hired, today announced that it has appointed Margo Georgiadis as its first independent board member. Georgiadis was most recently the President and CEO of Ancestry.com and prior to that, the CEO of Mattel, Inc. and President, Americas, at Google Inc.
“In our search for our first independent board member, we wanted to find someone with exceptional operational experience at fast growing consumer and marketplace businesses, but also someone who is deeply aligned with our vision to help all students, no matter their background, to find jobs and build meaningful careers,” said Garrett Lord, Handshake co-founder and CEO. “We’re excited to partner with Margo as we transform the early career landscape and position Handshake for long-term growth and expansion.”
Georgiadis brings a wealth of experience to Handshake’s board from a career spent building mission-driven cultures and high-performing organizations. Throughout her tenure in roles such as Partner at McKinsey & Company, COO at Groupon, and CMO of Discover Financial Services, she established a lasting reputation for driving outsized growth and returns by leveraging technology and data to deliver product and customer experience transformation. After playing a key role in taking Discover public, Georgiadis joined Google as Vice President of Global Sales Operations to help rapidly scale Google’s advertising products across all channels and products and to build new businesses in local and commerce. She was promoted to President, Google Americas and harnessed her passion for building ecosystems and partnerships to triple the size of the company’s largest region. She brought this same customer-first tenacity to Mattel to shape the company’s turnaround, and most recently to her role as CEO of Ancestry, where she led the company to undisputed global leadership in family history and consumer genomics with over 3.6 million subscribers, a consumer genomics network of 20 million people, $1+B in revenue, and record setting profitability and cash flow.
“Garrett and the Handshake team have built an impressive mission-driven business that is a force for meaningful social transformation at scale,” said Georgiadis. “I am delighted to partner with the team to help Handshake fulfill its boldest ambitions to empower young job seekers to successfully launch and develop vibrant careers.”
Handshake’s rapidly growing platform now includes 17 million job seeking college students, 1,100 institutions of higher learning and more than 500,000 employers. With the introduction of its virtual platform this past fall, along with its expansion in the UK and to community colleges, Handshake experienced an unprecedented period of growth and more than doubled its annual recurring revenue (ARR). This past fall, Handshake hosted over 2,300 virtual events at 700 schools. Nearly 18,000 employers and more than 260,000 students attended virtual events via the platform. As the future of work rapidly changes, Handshake’s robust virtual solution will continue to lead the way in helping employers access and recruit diverse early talent from across the country in a cost-effective and efficient manner, while offering students and higher education career centers a more curated, equitable, and outcome-rich experience.
In the coming year, Handshake will continue to shape the future of work by both serving an expanded universe of students across geographies and educational institutions, and building innovative solutions that revolutionize how employers attract and hire early talent to build a truly diverse and inclusive workforce.
About Handshake
Handshake is the number one site for college students to find a job. Today, the Handshake community includes 17 million students and young alumni at over 1,000 colleges and universities — including 150+ minority-serving institutions. We connect up-and-coming talent across all 50 states with 500,000 employers recruiting on Handshake — from every Fortune 500 company to thousands of small businesses, nonprofits, startups, and more. Handshake is democratizing opportunity and ensuring college students have the support they need to find a great job and kick-off a meaningful career regardless of where they go to school, what they choose as a major, and who they know. Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Denver and London, UK.
SOURCE Handshake