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Coursera, the largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), on Tuesday announced Coursera Career Services, a match-making tool aimed at connecting its most talented students to companies that are looking to hire. The company will offer its students the chance to opt in to a database that employers can then browse in search of job candidates. "If you do well in a Coursera class and allow us to share that information with potential employers (who will have agreed to keep this information in strict confidence, and use only for the purpose of considering you for employment), this could make you even more appealing to employers," wrote the company in a release.
At first the service will focus on software engineering. Coursera says it has relationships with several software companies, including Facebook, Twitter, AppDirect and TrialPay, and has successfully gotten students hired during a pilot phase the company has been running for several months. As MOOC providers explore revenue models in lieu of charging tuition for their massive courses, recruiting services such as this may figure prominently. Udacity, another for-profit MOOC provider, has also been pursuing a "headhunter" model whereby companies pay for introductions to talented students.
In Coursera's contract with the University of Virginia the company lists "employee recruiting" as one of its potential monetization strategies. "Company will allow prospective employers to execute queries against end user records," stipulates the contract. "These queries might involve end user performance in relevant courses... as well as end user-supplied demographic information." A percentage of the revenue generated by Coursera Career Services would go to the universities that are running the relevant courses.
