I’m pleased to welcome Colleen Jenkins as a new author on EQ. She’s the founder and CEO of Pluggedin, a job listings portal for those looking for jobs working in startups.

A longtime member of the STL startup ecosystem, Colleen was formerly the Head of Talent Acquisition at Cultivation Capital. Prior to that, Colleen was also instrumental in founding and launching Coder Girl, a tech skills development program for girls across the country, which eventually became its own division at LaunchCode.

With so much experience in the startup scene in St. Louis, Colleen is an obvious choice for a new community voice on EQ. Colleen is going to share career and management advice for those looking to work in startups.

Yet, beyond that, it was my personal experience with PluggedIn’s product that accelerated our formal partnership on EQ.

When the platform first launched earlier this year, Colleen’s team at PluggedIn hosted a Spring Talent Showcase in partnership with Cortex. Reversing the traditional interview process, the talent showcase had startup founders pitch their companies to current students looking for internships at a startup.

In turn, students then pitched their own interests and abilities to the companies present and everyone matched themselves through a speed dating-style survey. Personally speaking, the talent showcase led us to find six potential candidates and finally make two hires.

Ultimately, the event was a great success and the experience of working with interns was immensely valuable to the company as a whole. The differentiator for all involved was that everyone was there because they wanted to work at startups, and that intention alone transformed the quality of our hiring process — and even our vision of what was possible in the roles we wanted to create.

With that in mind, EQ would like every fledgling and growing startup in St Louis to have access to those kind of resources, so we made the obvious choice:

Let’s team up with Pluggedin and… Relaunch TEQjobs!

Introducing the TEQJOBS Job Board

In time for Startup Connection and Global Entrepreneurship Week, EQ and PluggedIn are launching a platform to help our readers find startup jobs in St. Louis.

TEQJOBS helps you find inroads to the Saint Louis innovation community.