By Reece Alvarez

QuadJobs, a Greenwich-based job matching service connecting employers looking to fill part-time jobs with college students, recently ramped up its efforts to reach a goal of filling 10,000 job listings. The effort is paying off, lifting the number of total connections to more than 6,200 in the last few months.

Led by founders Bridie Loverro, Andra Newman and Betsy O’Reilly, the company decided in September to remove the  monthly fee of $8.95 employers had been required to pay to list their job offers. The move was designed to reduce some of what was perceived as friction and impediment to bringing new user-employers onto the site, Loverro said.

The resulting growth has bordered on explosive, she said.

“It has been very successful in terms of bringing employers and getting them to post jobs,” she said. “This has translated to more student engagement because they see more jobs.”

Through the site, employers list jobs ranging from babysitting and bartending to graphic design and marketing opportunities. Students, who register with the site for free, can then browse the opportunities and apply for the jobs.

Just entering its second year of operation, the website has been a hit with students, as well, Loverro said. The site currently boasts a pool of more than 8,000 students, representing 400 schools across the tristate region who are willing to take on hourly work at the click of a button. Of this pool, more than 6,000 students are based in Fairfield and Westchester counties alone, Loverro said.

Because students travel across the country for the holidays, the service has also sprung up outside the region, including in Chicago and on Long Island, she said.

Mike DeGennaro, a 22-year-old graduate student studying accounting at Fairfield University, said the flexibility the site provides is exactly why he has worked more than a dozen jobs through the site and has spread the word to friends who have become members, as well.

“I spend a lot of time studying,” he said. “QuadJobs gives me the opportunity to work when I have the time instead of a strict schedule that I have to follow. I know there are a lot of students who get part-time jobs and they end up being forced to work when they are busy, and then when they are not busy they can’t find the right amount of hours.”

For both students and employers, the service is all about getting what you need, when you need it, Loverro said.

Loverro expects to hit the mark of 10,000 job connections by January as the organization is seeing a huge increase in activity around the holidays, she said.

Once at 10,000, the company will go back to a pay-to-play model for employers and charge $7 for one-time users and $25 for a yearly subscription to the service, she said.

With steady growth, Loverro said she sees her company as uniquely positioned to expand and capitalize on the trends and demographics that are propelling the emerging on-demand economy — currently led by industry pioneers like ride-sharing innovator Uber and accommodations industry disruptor AirBnB.

“Our business is a marriage of  a very old-school concept — word of mouth of neighbors — and basically brought that to the digital era and married it with the huge trend of on-demand economies,” she said. “We have kind of automated it in a way that could have never been done before.”

The service also sets itself apart from a typical job board by providing reviews and data tracking of student performance, which enables students to quantify their part-time work and parlay it into measured real-world experience, she said.

QuadJobs is not the first to enter the part-time job placement arena and likely will not be the last, said economist Pete Gioia of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association.

“These sorts of interactions of people and intermediaries who have captured the power of web and online, we are just going to see this continue. We see this throughout the economy,” Gioia said. “The use of the Internet to connect people with opportunities, whatever they might be, is definitely something that is growing, has been growing and will continue to grow.”

This article was originally posted on WestfairOnline.com on December 10, 2015.