Our story
"Tell them you have firsthand manufacturing experience”
Post-graduation, when applying for jobs relevant to his degree, our founder Fredrik didn’t think his resume would impress anyone. In college, he’d spent summers working the assembly line at a meatpacking plant in his hometown. It took a mentor to help him realize his unique value as a job applicant and to communicate it confidently. Mentoring helped kickstart Fredrik’s career and it provided the inspiration (and the name) for our business.
Founded at Harvard Business School
When HBS's head of career services lamented that her 40 career coaches couldn't meet student demand, Fredrik and three classmates decided to turn their school project, of delivering career advisors on demand, into a real business. They called it Evisors.
Launch of Evisors.com
With 250 Harvard and Wharton MBAs signed up as career advisors, we launched Evisors.com, the world's first on demand career advisor site. We targeted job seekers directly, who paid by the hour, but universities soon started buying the service for their students.
Launch of World's First Alumni Mentoring Platform
When a growing number of our 3,000+ paid career advisors starting saying that they would help students at their alma maters for free, we decided to re-engineer Evisors.com to create the world's first alumni mentoring platform for higher education.
Evisors Becomes Firsthand
Sales of our alumni mentoring platform quickly outpaced those of Evisors.com. We decided the company needed a new name to reflect our focus on building mentoring technology rather than selling mentoring hours. We decided to call the company Firsthand.
The Pay It Forward Platform
Today Firsthand offers a full suite of engagement tools and serves hundreds of universities worldwide, helping applicants, students, and alumni find success and reach their potential.
