Ushering in a New Era at RippleMatch: Building the Future of Hiring

Three years ago, I chose to join RippleMatch because I felt an immediate connection to its mission of expanding access to opportunity. I saw a product and a team with the potential to fundamentally change how hiring works in today’s world, making it fairer, faster, smarter, and more human. My own journey began in another country at a school few people here had ever heard of, so joining the leadership team of a New York-based tech startup felt like a major milestone in my career. I had worked hard to get to that point, but I also had quite a bit of luck along the way. I was fortunate enough to cross paths with some amazing people who helped me push my career and life forward in ways I never thought were possible. To me, RippleMatch has always felt like a way to pass some of that luck forward and help others access the kind of opportunity that changed my own life.

I’m incredibly honored to share that I’ll be stepping into the role of CEO as the next chapter in my journey at RippleMatch. I’m deeply grateful to Andrew for the vision, grit, and leadership that got us here and for his trust in me. This company has always stood for transforming how emerging talent connects with opportunity, and leading RippleMatch into its next stage is a responsibility I take on with pride, urgency, and optimism. The opportunity to help reshape how the next generation finds meaningful work and how companies build future-ready teams represents a massive, critical juncture in how we build and nurture the future workforce. 

The rise of AI is profoundly transforming the entry-level job market—making it harder than ever for young talent to get a foot in the door. The profile of early-career talent companies need is shifting dramatically. Companies aren’t looking for candidates with experience with a specific tool on their resume or a degree from a top school anymore – they’re looking to find adaptable, AI-skilled, impact-ready talent who can grow and adapt with their teams. With AI automating a lot of hard skills, true long-term potential lies more than ever in adaptability, initiative, and strategic thinking. Studies from top-tier institutions like MIT and Stanford prove that workers proficient in AI tools across disciplines such as coding, customer support and document drafting achieve productivity gains ranging from 15% to over 55%, compared to peers without AI skills. Hiring this kind of talent isn’t just a strategic advantage – it’s becoming an efficiency imperative for employers.

On the flip side, candidates face the most difficult job market since the pandemic. Entry-level opportunities have decreased as AI has automated more and more tasks, and our education system isn’t keeping pace with the demands of today’s job market. As a result, most graduates are entering the workforce without hands-on experience in AI or the practical, cross-functional soft skills employers now expect.

Existing tools are insufficient for both employers and job seekers. Traditional job boards and application automation tools generate hundreds of indistinguishable resumes and applications in seconds, delivering overwhelming volume, not precision or results. To succeed in this market, employers need to know who they are hiring, and candidates need solutions that can help them signal the capabilities that they do have to employers and build the skills they don’t yet possess to become stronger candidates. In short, hiring as we know it has to change.

Within this disruption is opportunity. As much as AI is making the hiring process noisier, if used instead to foster smarter connections and help guide candidates through finding their paths, it can also make it much better.

RippleMatch is rebuilding the infrastructure of early-career hiring for the AI era. We’re evolving from a job-matching tool into an end-to-end system that helps candidates build and showcase their capabilities, helps employers cut through the noise to find the right future-ready talent, and helps both players make meaningful connections on the criteria that matters most.

RippleMatch hosts one of the most AI-ready talent pools in the market, powered by rich, human-created profiles that go far beyond resumes, capturing academic and work achievements, leadership experience, and assessed AI skills. Our product combines human insight with leading, integrated assessment tools, allowing us to layer validated technical and problem-solving scores directly into profiles. This combination of structured talent data, verified skill assessments, and curated human profiles provides employers objective signals on job readiness and positions RippleMatch to deliver higher-quality matches, shorten hiring cycles, and set a new standard for early-career recruitment in an AI-driven economy.

We’re focused on two things:

1.) We’re delivering unmatched hiring signals for employers from the leading network of AI-skilled emerging talent. We’re going beyond resumes to provide verified insights into each candidate’s skills, AI fluency, and real-world readiness. Our platform doesn’t just send you any applicant–it matches you on the most important criteria and assessed skills, so that you only see qualified applicants with the readiness to thrive in the modern workplace. We help hiring teams identify top talent faster, reduce time spent screening, and make confident decisions grounded in richer, more predictive data. The result: higher-quality hires, shorter time-to-fill, and stronger long-term outcomes.

2.) We’re building the best candidate experience in the market. Candidates feel overwhelmed by today’s job market as they face intense competition and shifting skill requirements driven by AI. RippleMatch doesn’t simply match emerging talent to jobs but actively prepares them to succeed. We’ll counsel candidates on what roles are actually a good fit for them, help them build and showcase relevant skills, and give them actionable feedback along the way in a way that feels intuitive and personalized. We’re creating a platform where every interaction helps candidates grow, not just apply, and where early-career talent can navigate the job market with clarity, confidence, and real momentum.

Whether you’re a hiring team navigating change, a candidate looking for your way into the industry, or a customer thinking about the future of work, we want to work with you. This is the beginning of a stronger, bolder and more focused RippleMatch. And our upcoming releases and features are just the beginning of what we’re building. As a collective, we get to help rewrite the rules of early-career hiring and create real, scalable impact in the process. We’re not just evolving: we’re architecting the new standard for how the next generation enters the workforce, and I couldn’t be more energized for what’s ahead.

Thanks to everyone who’s believed in and supported RippleMatch so far, and thanks to the team for having gotten us here and for jumping into this new chapter with us. We have a team of smart, thoughtful, and inspiring individuals who are driven by the belief that a better way is possible, and I feel lucky to be building this with all of you.

Audrey

Learn more about RippleMatch here.