While working as the talent director at health care venture fund JumpStart Foundry, Daniel Oppong was regularly contacted by students from across the country with one question:
Do you have any job opportunities?
While Oppong couldn’t always provide those opportunities, the consistent outreach gave him an idea.
“One of the things that was great about being at JumpStart was they always encouraged us to be entrepreneurial and think about different ways we can solve problems,” Oppong said. “For me, I’m like, ‘Can we turn this [problem] into a program that serves our portfolio and helps students find opportunities?’ Because the consistent thread is that they were interested in health and health care, but didn’t want to be doctors and nurses.”
To that end, Oppong founded OhanaHealth in 2017 to connect students with health-tech companies looking for talent. Last week, the company launched a tech platform to scale the process, which allows students to create a free profile while searching for internships and job opportunities.
The platform currently has “a handful” of Nashville-based companies using the service, Oppong said, including Greenlight Medical, Stratasan and Trilliant Health, along with JumpStart portfolio companies.
Prior to creating the tech platform, Ohana worked more like a traditional staffing company, Oppong said, with a summer fellowship program for students interested in the health-tech space.
The first year, about 170 students applied for the program from 60 universities. That number exploded the next year, with more than 1,000 students applying each year since from more than 120 schools, each looking for a job.
“In a traditional staffing model, I was the only person on staff and I can’t place 1,000 students by myself. … No. 2, the startups' hiring cycles were very unpredictable,” Oppong said. “The students are the most engaged population so we had to create something that actually serves them. … We curate job opportunities for the students and make it easier for them to find it.”
That may seem like a tall order during the age of Covid-19, but Oppong said the pandemic has created opportunities for growth for many health-tech companies, as traditional health care companies have been forced to embrace innovative services like telehealth.
“The world is in a very interesting place, with the convergence of a health care crisis and one of the worst job markets in recent history,” Marcus Whitney, JumpStart founding partner, said in a news release. “In mentoring Daniel, I know him to be passionate about connecting people and creating opportunities for others. I have no doubt that through OhanaHealth, he and the team will continue to elevate the talent our industry needs – young people who will build health care and tech companies to fix the societal challenges and inequities of our time.”
The next step for Ohana, which Oppong bootstrapped, is to launch a company portal on its platform in the fall to allow startups to create profiles and interact with candidates. The company is also adding machine-learning capabilities to more easily match students with employers.
“One of the main things [JumpStart] stressed on the way in is, ‘Come in and learn the way of entrepreneurship and then go do your thing,’” Oppong said. “It feels like a pretty opportunistic moment to create something meaningful that meets the world in this moment of [Covid].”
