How She Went from A World Champion of Video Game to Career Development Tech Startup CEO
This is Part III of the Series “3 Chinese Young Female Entrepreneurs To Watch in 2015”, featuring Barbara Yu, Cofounder and CEO of UniCareer.
Barbara is pissed that she didn’t get the unicareer.com domain. Looking at this skinny, petite, youthful girl, you won’t believe that she actually represented China in the global tournament of DotA (Defense of The Ancients, an online battle area mod for video game), and won the world championship, all because she wanted to show her boyfriend that she could do it, too. Barbara attended Fudan University, a prestigious university in Shanghai, and was selected for an exchange program at Princeton University. With a “typical finance background”, she put her stellar academics and career experience (including positions at Morgan Stanley, FXCM, Citi, GE and Google) to good use with her startup UniCareer, which provides systematic online and offline training courses to develop professional talents that are much needed in the marketplace.
More often than not, entrepreneurship is not a revolutionary technology innovation, but finding a gap and trying to bridge the gap. UniCareer does just that. It identified the fact that international graduates in the U.S. have a difficult time getting jobs, and desirable corporations complain that they cannot find ideal hires. UniCareer was founded to help college students upgrade their career skills and provide a highly curated talent pool for employers. This way, both upstream (students) and downstream (corporations) are happy.
Barbara told a story about a boy, a dad and a lawn. The point was to illustrate that leaders need to set clear expectations, because others almost always see things differently from you do. If your hires are not performing well, reflect on yourself and ask whether you made it crystal clear the first time. When is the deadline? What is the minimum requirement? How long should it take? What resources are available? Only when you make it as specific as possible can your staff understand what your intentions and expected results are.
On the question “what’s your best career advice,” Barbara laughed and said. “treat every interviewer as your first date”. Because only then, you are motivated to behave, be pleasant, and answer questions based on the interviewer’s style. Getting a job is like dating — you have to be likable. Getting customers is the same way. Barbara and her team have visited over 40 top universities in the U.S. on an organized UniCareer Campus Tour. Curating and educating customers is important for what she does, because many students don’t realize that they absolutely need this service to be marketable in the job hunt. Not only does she charmed students everywhere she went, she also talked collaboration with all the career centers. Many schools have agreed to outsource career training for international students to UniCareer, which means she’s getting B2B contracts as well as B2C clients. Barbara is not a marketer by trade, but her talents have enabled her to write several “soft articles” with 100,000+ views that subtly gave students many reasons to become a UniCareer client. When she talked on stage to these students, “I never advertised UniCareer. Instead, I made sure that the audience resonated with me and liked me a lot.” Of course they did. No doubt she’s well on her way to be the best career training resource for international students in America.
Originally published on iamsogal.com.
