Tuesday 10 February 2015 A free app that aims to help students to shine at job interviews has been developed by former Leeds Grammar School pupil Ashley Boonin (OL08). Ashley has joined forces with two university friends to launch gradApp for students trying to get on to highly competitive graduate training schemes in banking, accountancy, marketing, law, consulting and retail. The app, which is free to download for iPhone, iPad and iPod, is already proving popular with students at the University of Birmingham where it was launched in July as a test run. It provides users with questions that they might face in an interview, plus tips to help them structure their answers, saving hours of research time. Its simple interface also allows users to write and store their answers. Ashley said: “The great thing about gradApp is that users can practise for interviews whenever and wherever they are: on the commute, in their room, waiting for lectures, even just before their interview.” Ashley, who obtained a first in economics at Birmingham University, has recently qualified as an ACA accountant with EY (Ernst and Young). He and two university friends decided to create the app in their spare time as a fun project, starting last February and officially launching in July. In October they hired a brand manager on campus at Birmingham to raise awareness of the app. Next year they plan to expand their marketing campaign to target five more campuses and then they will reassess the project. He said: “The reason for the cautious approach is that we have set ourselves a very tight budget as the aim was to have a bit of fun and create something useful rather than to create a large scale business. However, feedback from Birmingham is encouraging and many students are asking us to expand the app to different mobile platforms such as Android, which is something that we are now working on. “We are entirely self-funded, something that we’re very proud of, however we aren’t closed to the idea of working with other companies as the app grows in the future.” To download the app for free, search for gradApp in the Apple AppStore or for more information visit http://www.gradapp.info/. Alumni News
