The College Fix

“Wish you could earn money when you want it, without having to get a job? We made an app for that.”

So claims the Detroit-based college marketing agency Campus Commandos, whose forthcoming app Go Commando will let college students use their mobile phones to become freelance brand representatives on their campuses.

There’s more to the app’s name than just a double entendre, Campus Commandos founder Adam Grant told The College Fix in a phone interview.

“We find that students are constantly on the move, so we call our students ‘commandos,’ and ‘Go Commando’ kind of fit,” Grant said, but “we enjoyed the humorous aspect of it as well.”

Scheduled for release mid-month, Go Commando will offer job opportunities for students at 55 universities across the country, ranging from the University of California to the University of Pennsylvania.

The app has officially partnered with HTC and L’Oreal. Additional partnerships will be announced after the app’s release, according to Grant.

In designing the app, which he calls the first of its kind, Grant drew on his experience as a representative for 10 different brands to put himself through college.

“There’s really no other platform that allows companies to immediately connect with students whenever they have simple on-campus marketing tasks,” Grant said.

Campus Commandos did over a year of research into how to streamline the process of joining potential student brand representatives to companies that wanted to advertise on college campuses.

“We realized that more and more students were engaging with everything through their mobile device,” Grant said. “Rather than responding to emails, they were responding faster through texts.”

Moving the process to mobile phones for brands to acquire campus representation streamlines hiring, according to Grant.

Typically “a company will post the position on Craigslist or their internal HR job board, or the school’s job board, and a student will apply for it and then the brand will go through several interviews and then hire that student,” Grant said.

That process is ineffective because “a student’s resume isn’t quite built up yet, so when you think about it the traditional hiring process doesn’t really apply yet,” he said.

Under Go Commando’s process, students download the iOS or Android app, create an account and answer a series of personal questions to establish their profile, which the app will use to match students with potential representation jobs.

“We’d rather get to know the students based on their interests and what they want to do, their personality, and ally brands that way,” Grant said.

From there, students will receive notifications of potential jobs they can complete.

“These are quick, simple, on-campus marketing tasks,” such as “putting up flyers,” or “reserving a space on campus,” Grant said. “Everything will be listed up front, so you know what you’re getting into.”

There will not be pressure from the company or the brands to complete a certain amount of tasks in a certain amount of time, but students will work “around your class schedule,” Grant said.

Once student representatives accept a task, they complete it and document proof of their work through the tools in the app, such as taking pictures of flyers they hung up or filling out a survey.

Students get paid “immediately” through direct deposit, Grant said, which could help them combat student loan debt.

Completing tasks will allow students to acquire job experience and “resume building with name brands,” Grant said.

“When you’re in an interview for your first entry-level position, it gives you an experience to talk about” rather than just a “high GPA,” he said.

College Fix reporter Julianne Stanford is a student at the University of Arizona.

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IMAGES: Go Commando