I Started A Business That's Helped Thousands Of College Grads Get Jobs

Steven Rothberg

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Published: April 18th, 2022

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Steven Rothberg

Founder, College Recruiter

Founders

Employees

College Recruiter

collegerecruiter.com

from Minneapolis

started January 1991

Founders

Employees

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I’m the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of College Recruiter, which believes that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career.

College Recruiter’s customers are primarily Fortune 1,000 companies, government agencies, and other employers who are hiring at scale, meaning dozens or even hundreds into the same or similar role. They advertise with us their part-time, seasonal, internship, and entry-level jobs that require 0-3 years of experience. Each year, we help more than 3 million students and recent graduates of one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities find great careers.

The business we operate today is quite different from that which I founded three decades ago. Initially, we published maps of college campuses and sold the advertising around the edges. At any given time, advertised on our site are well over a million early career opportunities in dozens of countries around the world.

We’ve been very, very happy with our growth and can measure that in several ways. In terms of the number of candidates who use our site, that’s up about 10 fold over the past half dozen years. The number of job posting ads is up about 25 fold in that same period. Revenues have tripled while gross and net profits are rapidly increasing.

What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?

I was born an entrepreneur. My paternal grandfather and father were both entrepreneurs and I was disciplined in fifth grade for selling jawbreakers in the middle of math class. Those jawbreakers, by the way, cost me $0.05 as I bought them in bulk and I sold them for the same $0.25 as my classmates were buying them individually.

Build and prove your product. Then, use that to refine your business plan so that you can understand what your needs and wants may be.

In college, I started a microbusiness that published a map of my undergraduate campus. I generated revenues by selling the advertising around the borders, which was pretty easy to do once I secured an agreement with the school for my maps to be the exclusive map for the school for that year. Later, after grad school, I started a similar business in my new hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I had virtually no savings when I started this company in 1991. My investment, if you can call it that, was about $250 to buy business cards and a fax machine. The reality is that my investment was far more about sweat than monetary equity.

Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?

The first few years of the business saw rapid revenue and profit growth for what was essentially a one-person company. During that time, I also got married, we had our first kid, and we bought a house.

After a few years, my wife and I could see that we needed to expand our business in some way. The question was how. We wrote a detailed business plan and that revealed that our competitive advantage wasn’t in map-making but, instead, in helping advertising reach the college audience. One thing led to another and in 1994 we started to publish a print magazine that we later renamed, College Recruiter. By 1996, we had four, regionalized versions and were publishing them at the start of the fall, winter, and spring university seasons. Our customers were employers who advertised their job openings in the magazines, some in just one region but many nationally in all of the magazines.

In 1996, a college career service office director told me that there was this thing called the Internet and that we should get a website. We paid a high school kid who worked for us $3,000 to build the first version of our site. We’re building version seven now, which will allow us to better reach a wide variety of early career audiences globally.

Today, we’re one of the highest-trafficked sites in the early career niche and expanding rapidly both in the U.S. and globally. Until a few months ago, we only accepted job postings for roles located in North America. Today, about 10 percent of our postings are in Europe, Asia, Australia, and other areas around the world.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

College Recruiter is profitable and that’s growing rapidly. We’re a small, privately held company and so don’t publicly disclose our revenue or profit numbers.

When an employer advertises a job on CollegeRecruiter.com, we share that job posting an ad with hundreds of college and university career sites, college and university newspapers, and other career sites. Some of the candidates will find a job posting on CollegeRecruiter.com while others will find it on one of those other sites. Regardless of where they find the job, they read it and then, if interested, click the apply button. They then go to the application page set by the employer to, hopefully, apply.

That click to the employer’s application page is the action that triggers most of our revenue as almost all of our customers pay us on a cost-per-click basis. A click to an employer site might cost $0.25 or $0.75 or more than $1.00. The amount varies significantly based on factors such as where the job is located, the strength of the employer’s brand, the attractiveness of the opportunity, the number of candidates the employer wants to hire from the posting, and the amount of time over which the employer wants to hire those people.

Performance-based pricing like we offer was popularized 20 years ago by Google and is the same model used by other, leading consumer marketing sites like Facebook. Some job boards like Indeed sell it very well, but few niche sites sell it at all. Our people, process, and product knowledge and execution with performance-based pricing give us a huge advantage over our competitors.

Over the coming months and years, you’ll see more and more postings on CollegeRecruiter.com and more and more of them for roles outside of North America. Instead of being primarily a way for U.S. students and recent graduates to find great, new careers, we’ll be known for doing that globally.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Raising investment money can be necessary, helpful, or destructive. We should have raised investment money when embarking on the changes we made to sell performance-based ads as were quite profitable but needed to take a step back to take 10 forward. We needed to rebuild our people, product, and pricing to do that, and that required a lot of investment in terms of staff time and money.

That said, far too many start-ups place far too much emphasis on raising money. Founders are often very good at raising money and very bad at running a successful business. Outsiders and, sometimes, employees equate the massive spending of those start-ups with success, but often it is just a sign that the leaders know how to raise and spend money, but don’t know how to use it to generate a profitable business.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

College Recruiter uses a variety of platforms and tools. Our site is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and our developers use a variety of tools that I’m not well acquainted with.

On the business side, our most important tools are Google Workspace for email; Salesforce for customer relationship management; Pardot for marketing automation; and Slack for non-urgent, internal communications.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

The only two media that I consume that have significant impacts on how I get my work done are The Chad and Cheese Podcast, which covers human resource technology stories in a snarky way, and the AIM Group’s subscription-based e-newsletters about major developments in classified advertising globally.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Put building a product or service that is compelling to your potential customers ahead of raising money. I see far too many, young, entrepreneurs stifled by their perception that they need to raise millions of dollars to be deemed successful. That may be true in a few markets like San Francisco, but not at all in the rest of the world.

Build and prove your product. Then, use that to refine your business plan so that you can understand what your needs and wants may be. Then, if a massive investment is necessary, try to raise those funds. But understand that investment is just a milestone. It is a step to success. It is not success in and of itself.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are planning to hire several people for different roles starting in October but we don’t know enough about the roles to start publicizing that information.

Where can we go to learn more?

Website