Woodbridge's Alexander and Stephanie Florio find onging success with SWOB app

About a year after its launch, Swob gets an award and 11,000 student subscribers

Yorkregion.com
November 29, 2018
Dina Al-Shibeeb

After a year of its launch, a startup app by two siblings, Alexander and Stephanie Florio of Woodbridge, is continuing to charge through with success.

The Florio brother and sister left their marketing jobs to officially dedicate their time to launch their app Swob in November last year.

“Think Tinder, but for jobs! You swipe left on the jobs you aren't interested in and right on the jobs that you are,” the 27-year-old Alexander Florio said.

To put things in perspective, Swob so far has 11,000 student subscribers and more than 70 employers. “Right now, Swob is available across Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, and we hope to be across the country by the end of 2019,” he added. “Once we are across Canada, we want to expand into the United States, and eventually go global.”

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The jobs found on Swob are from the type of companies students seek employment in like McDonalds, Tim Hortons, Bell Canada, or Virgin Mobile Canada.

So far, Swob is only downloadable on iPhones, however, for Google and Android phones, prospects are improving.

“Unfortunately right now, we are actually developing it for Samsung and Google; currently it’s only available on iPhones,” he said, who himself has an Android phone. “We like to joke around that as one of the founders of the app...I don't even have my own app on my phone.”

However, the young entrepreneur said the app “should be available for android users early next year.”

This is not the first time Swob is making some news. As a matter of fact, they were the winners of the first Sir Richard Branson competition “Pitch to Rich” in Canada this year.

The British billionaire and philanthropist Richard Branson personally handed the siblings their $10,000 award in Calgary in May this year.

Alexander and Stephanie, 29, came up with the idea after finding out that a lot of students are still using antiquated methods to apply for jobs.

“After meeting with tons of students, we found that even though that everything is done online, these students are still applying to jobs with old-school methods. They are still printing out stacks of resumes, and walk around in malls, hand in their resumes,” he said.

“It is frustrating for them because they are wasting their time and more often than not, they don’t hear from these employers.”

“Swob

Think Tinder, but for employment. Photo Courtesy of Swob.

Asked about how many have landed their jobs through Swob, he said: “We know that there are people who have been hired through the app, but we don’t know the exact number.”

He added that they are working to gather the data to find out.