Companies seta real task.Students solve it.

Companies outside the well known target industries barely reach top talent. If you are not consulting, tech or automotive, you simply do not appear on a graduate’s shortlist. An unfilled position still costs money, every month.

At the same time selection itself is unreliable. An application shows how someone presents themselves, not how they work. Work samples and practical projects, by contrast, have been considered the most predictive selection method for later professional success for decades.

Instead of a job posting, a company sets a real task from its own operation. Student teams work on it over a defined period and present their solution to the company’s jury at the end.

Three things happen at once that would otherwise take three separate initiatives: visibility with an audience the company barely reaches, concrete solutions to a real problem, and a recruiting head start, because the teams have already shown how they work.

The process is deliberately lean. For the company the effort is limited to a kick-off conversation, agreeing the frame, and the jury. Everything in between is handled by meedup.

A challenge pays into employer branding, recruiting and the actual work at the same time. That combination is what sets it apart from a careers fair or an advertising campaign.

Access to the teams is the real core of the model. It rests on a self-built database of more than 1,000 student initiatives across Germany, from student councils and student consultancies to founding and engineering societies.

That way a challenge does not go to an anonymous crowd but to students who already demonstrate that they engage beyond their coursework. This is exactly the group companies are looking for, and exactly the one that is hardest to reach through conventional channels.

A company from food retail faces exactly the problem described above. Many know it as the supermarket around the corner, few think of the career opportunities at its headquarters. The challenge therefore asks: how do we break that image among top talent?

It goes out with tiered prize money and a fixed runtime. The best concepts go to the company’s jury, which picks the winners itself.

As co-founder I own product and business model. That covers developing and validating the model in the market, deriving and prioritising product requirements, and building the advisory board.