A skills-first marketplace that gets international graduate students hired on what they can do, not on a CV nobody reads.
Every international graduate student in Toronto runs into the same wall. The talent is real, the degrees are real, but the moment the job hunt starts, the experience gets discounted. "No Canadian experience" becomes a polite way of saying no. Resumes vanish into application portals. The part-time listings that do exist are half dead. And the one thing that would actually help, a way to prove capability directly to an employer, does not exist.
SideHusl is my answer to that wall. It started as a simple part-time job board for students and grew into something sharper: a two-sided marketplace where a verified skill score replaces the CV, where students get matched to real part-time work and paid projects, and where a Canadian portfolio gets built one completed job at a time. This page walks through how the idea took shape, the business model behind it, and what I am ultimately trying to build.
SideHusl connects two groups that need each other and currently struggle to meet: international graduate students looking for credible Canadian work, and Canadian employers and project owners looking for vetted talent without the overhead of traditional hiring.
The core move is to delete the two things that fail students the most, the CV and the "Canadian experience" requirement, and replace them with proof. A student takes a short skill assessment, earns a verified score, and that score becomes the signal an employer trusts instead of a resume. Matching works through a familiar, low-friction swipe interface, discovery runs both ways so employers can find students too, and every completed job adds to a verified Canadian portfolio the student carries forward into full-time job hunting after graduation.
In practice, SideHusl is built around a few deliberate choices:
It serves two segments at once. Students are the primary side and the reason the product exists; Canadian employers and project owners are the secondary side and the reason the marketplace functions. Neither works without the other, which is why every design decision had to earn its place on both sides of the exchange.