Matteo Grades Classmates to Help Them Find a Job
He took the best of Facebook and mixed it with LinkedIn, creating something completely new. That's how Matteo Achilli created Egomnia, a website that is a kind of social network, but with a much more concrete objective compared to getting updated on other people's information: helping students and graduates find internship or placement opportunities. Matteo, who is from Rome, started at Bocconi a few months ago, where he's in his first year of the Bachelor of Business Administration and Management.
 Matteo Achilli |
Egomnia, which was recently launched, works like this: anyone who registers and is looking for job and internship offers does not send their CV, but creates a profile by completing a series of fields, such as degree program and university and language or IT certificates. Based on the information, the system gives points to the person's profile. "That way," explains Matteo, "a ranking of the best students and graduates can be made. We believe that this is a very useful system for finding a job, partly because companies looking for personnel can filter their search based on their needs." The innovative aspect of Egomnia "is that it's different from other specialty websites in the sector," because it is based on the ease, intuitiveness, popularity and free cost of social networks, so that the relationship between registered users and the company is much more direct. This is also because, in addition to someone looking for work, companies can also register on the website.
Matteo got the idea of Egomnia when he was still looking at universities and attending a scientific secondary school in Rome. "I wanted to study economics and I wanted to do so at a private university," he says. "I looked at the rankings of the best Italian universities and I chose Bocconi through the Talent Scout program organized by the university. At the same time, I got interested in the algorithm that's behind Google's page rank system (which governs the search engine's page indexing) and I got the idea to create a system that creates a ranking of university students based on their characteristics." So, a year ago, Matteo Achilli started thinking about Egomnia. There were a lot of difficulties, especially at the beginning: "I needed a team to create the website, legal consultants, and a lot of data entry work for degree programs from various universities and various certifications."
The biggest problems, other than the technical aspects, "were what a 20-year guy who would like to be an entrepreneur would encounter," adds Matteo. And it can be summarized with one idea: "The problem of being listened to." Matteo went to several companies to propose his project, but he wasn't able to get into offices that would support him. "The problem is that in Italy, people want to see results right away, and they want you to present concrete data in hand, and if you're young, it complicates things."
His company, which has the same name as the website, is starting up today. The only administrator of his website, Matteo is looking towards the future without wavering: "I have discovered that an entrepreneurial career is for me. At this point, I'm worried about two things: being able to make my company grow, allowing it to diversify and making it a point of reference for the sector, in particular in this moment when interest in the field of web 2.0 initiatives is moving once again towards Italy (for example, the recent case of Volunia, an Italian search engine)." And the second: "I need to finish my academic career. Over the past few days, during the website launch, studying hasn't been easy! Fortunately, at Bocconi a lot of people have shown interest in the project and a lot of the people currently registered at Egomnia are Bocconians."