CollegeRecruiter.com Blog

CollegeRecruiter.com went live in 1996 and has had a handful of major software updates since that time. We're scheduled to re-launch with our newest update the weekend of Saturday, May 17th and we're very excited.

To celebrate our impending re-launch, we'll automatically add to all employer accounts as many free job posting ad credits as they have active postings on the date that we re-launch. So if an employer has five active job postings on our re-launch date, we'll add five additional postings to their account at no charge! To buy your two-for-one postings, go to our registration page if you're a new client or our login page if you've previously registered with us.

Continue reading "CollegeRecruiter.com Re-launches With Free Job Postings" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 8, 2008 at 12:15 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Many including me predicted that the U.S. economy was in a recession during the first quarter. Turns out that news of the economy's ill health was greatly exaggerated. The economy actually grew during the first quarter of 2008, albeit barely. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, the country's economic growth from January through March was 0.6 percent. Hardly great, but definitely a lot better than many feared.

Not to toot our own horn, well, maybe a little, but our revenues were up during the first quarter of 2008. Our revenues increased by 22.4 percent in the first quarter in 2008 as compared to the same period a year earlier. That's off from the roughly 75 percent growth we saw from 2006 to 2007 but given the recession economy's only slight growth, we're feeling pretty good.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 1, 2008 at 4:23 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently accepted the Human Capital Institute's invitation to join their Expert Advisory Panel for Recruitment Advertising and Communications. The Human Capital Institute (HCI) is a global professional association and educator that is advancing the science of strategic talent management.

The panel meets on quarterly conference calls and collaborates through on-line technology to discuss trends, uncover leading-edge thinking and ideas, provide real examples and advice, guide HCI research and webcasts, and help push the industry forward in general by discussing what works and what doesn't. More specifically, Expert Advisors help HCI Community Leaders identify track topics for webcast and research development, identify leading speakers for webcasts, identify industry best practices and tools for the track, and help attract others interested in the track topics to help promote the track offerings. Expert Advisors also contribute to articles, research, webcasts and educational initiatives at HCI. Quotes from members of the panel may also occasionally be used in HCI content.

Continue reading "Human Capital Institute Expert Advisory Panel" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on May 1, 2008 at 4:00 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

It's been a year since Paul DeBettignies a/k/a the Minnesota Headhunter, Josh Kahn of Accenture at Best Buy, and I got together at Chipotle for some burritos and to plot strategy for how to increase the number of active recruiting bloggers in Minnesota. One thing led to another, which is often the case when you get three guys together over exceptionally good food, and the end result was the Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conferences.

Josh has been instrumental in getting the group access to the Best Buy world headquarters facilities. They have superb meeting rooms and the price is certainly right. Their in-house catering service also bends over backwards to make it as easy as possible to host an event in their building.

Joining the group later was Nicole St. Martin, who we affectionately refer to as Paul's wingman. She's the one who makes these volunteer-driven events happen so professionally that I have to believe that most attendees think that Tinkerbell must be involved as everything just magically works perfectly. She's an incredible asset to the recruiting world generally and the human resource search engine optimization community
specifically.

But it is Paul DeBettignies who is the driving force. He is the visionary and the face of the organization. My involvement has been negligible after that initial burrito fest. His involvement has been almost like a full-time job. His energy, enthusiasm, sense of humor, and wisdom are infectious. People just love to be around him. He must do incredible work helping his employer clients find outstanding I.T. candidates.

If you've never attended a Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference, you have another chance. Here are the details:

Continue reading "Minnesota Recruiters (un)Conference Spring 2008 - Free!" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 30, 2008 at 2:22 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

There are approximately 50,000 job boards in the United States and about the same elsewhere in the world. Many are essentially cookie cutter boards with little to no traffic and little to no unique job posting or article content. But all serve employers and job seekers and to survive and thrive all must therefore listen to those visitors to understand what features, functionality and services they like best on today's job boards.

Fortunately, the industry has the International Association of Employment Web Sites to help us out with keeping up-to-date on issues like this. The executive director, Peter Weddle, conducted a survey between April, 2007 and April, 2008 and generated over 15,700 responses. The results were:

• 19.4% The caliber of the job postings on a site;
  
• 19.1% The number of job postings on a site;
  
• 16.7% Ease of access to employment opportunities on the site;
  
• 16.2% The job search tools and information provided on a site;
  
• 16.1% The fact that access to employment opportunities is free; and
  
• 12.5% The ability to network with others on the site.
  

Continue reading "What Job Seekers Want From Job Boards" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 30, 2008 at 10:27 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 29, 2008 at 8:16 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I'm pleased to announce that we converted another of our unpaid intern bloggers to a paid employee.

William Frierson of Florence, South Carolina graduated from high school in 2002 and earned his associate's degree in business marketing in 2005.

William became an unpaid writing intern for CollegeRecruiter.com almost a year ago in May 2006. His writing and thoughtfulness so impressed us that we started to pay him to write for us on a freelance basis to help ensure that he would continue to write for us and hopefully write more and more. I've loved his work and work ethic and so was quite pleased when we finalized the paperwork last week and converted him to a W-2 employee. I have every confidence that he will continue to impress us and those who have the privilege of reading his articles.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 28, 2008 at 3:24 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Kudos to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) for creating the All That Jazz blog to help engage their members and hopefully increase the attendance at this spring's annual conference in New Orleans. The NACE annual conferences are very well attended and offer a wealth of content, but given how the career service office, employer, and other members are so spread out geographically it must be very difficult for NACE to engage with them throughout the year.

NACE asked for volunteers to write for the blog. I jumped at the opportunity and so did a handful of others. The entries and related comments so far have been diverse, regular, and interesting. A great example is a post about low student attendance at career center programs and ideas for what to do about it.

If you're looking for insight into the hearts and minds of those who live and breath college recruiting each and every day, then read the All That Jazz blog.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 17, 2008 at 11:29 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently had the good fortune of being interviewed via webcam by Bill Vick of XtremeRecruiting.tv about how recruiters and employers can and should use Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites for recruiting.

Note the extremely classy Minnesota Wild pennant over my left shoulder.

Enjoy the video!

Continue reading "Social Networking Interview by Bill Vick" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 11, 2008 at 4:31 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I had the pleasure of being a guest on a Human Capital Institute webcast earlier this week with Kristine Rhodes, Executive Director Talent Strategy for NAS Recruitment Communications, and Kristy Seidel, Manager of Recruiting for Hyatt Hotels and Resorts. The discussion was why and how employers should stand out from the crowd if they want to be successful in their efforts to hire college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

On today's college campuses, "eye-ball" time is at an all-time premium. Students are bombarded daily with credit card offers and philanthropic requests while employers are trying to communicate with them to fill their ranks with top-tier talent. The market is so saturated that investing dollars and effort may not guarantee success, but innovative strategizing will. Great employers struggle to stand out from the crowd and often don't have enough of their targeted students' bandwidth to communicate their differences.

Continue reading "Creating Employment Buzz On Campus: Standing Out In A Crowd" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 10, 2008 at 7:30 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I was approached by Kristine Rhodes, Executive Director & Talent Strategist at NAS Recruitment Communications, this past fall with the idea of conducting a survey of college students and recent graduates nationwide so that we could better understand how they want employers to communicate with them. Well, the results are in and they're very, very interesting.

This Tuesday from 1:00pm to 2pm ET / 10am to 11am PT, Kristine and I will be joined by Kristy Seidel, SPHR, Manager of Recruiting, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts - North American Operations, for a free 45 minute webcast entitled, "Creating Employment Buzz On Campus: Standing Out In a Crowd." We'd love for you to join us.

Continue reading "Creating Employment Buzz On Campus: Standing Out In a Crowd" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 4, 2008 at 9:31 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

We're receiving a steady number of postings to the new Facebook Career Blog application. It is free and takes seconds to add it to your Facebook account.

You'll be asked questions about your career, such as who was your favorite boss and why. Your Facebook friends will be alerted that you've posted answers to the questions and the question and answer will be posted to the CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog.

Share your career advice. Try it. You'll like it.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 2, 2008 at 3:14 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the biggest frustrations in running an Internet job board like CollegeRecruiter.com is trying to accurately measure the value that we deliver to our employer clients. The problem, simply put, is that the most of them don't know either.

The vast majority of medium to large employers use applicant tracking systems and the vast majority of those do not properly track the source of those applicants. Most of them do a fine job of tracking the applicants from the point of application but for an employer to understand where their recruiting dollars are best being spent they also need to track the source of the applications.

The ATS companies and many of their clients insist that a drop down box listing different sources used by the employer suffices. The reality is that these candidate self-identification systems only suffice in providing inaccurate information to the employers. A recent study by Don Firth's JobsInLogistics indicates that self-reporting mechanisms like these notorious drop down boxes result in the misidentification of the source some 83 percent of the time. In other words, five out of six job seekers do not know how they found the employer's on-line career site even though the bulk of them probably just clicked through from a job board like CollegeRecruiter.com, a targeted email, cell phone text message, etc.

Continue reading "Internet Job Boards Number One Source of Hire" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on April 2, 2008 at 9:24 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

We're live with our new our newest Facebook application: CollegeRecruiter.com Career Blog.

The new application asks you a series of career-related questions. The question and your answer are then displayed to your Facebook friends and also sent to one of our employees. If the content is appropriate (no swearing etc.) then our employee approves the Q&A for publication and it gets posted to the CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog like the blog entry about whether money is a big factor in choosing a job/career.

Try it out. Add it to your Facebook page and then let me know what you think.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 25, 2008 at 2:30 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Entry level jobs is a very sought after keyword search string for college job boards and other web sites that want to drive a significant amount of traffic from search engines like Google. It is what search engine optimization experts refer to as a short tail keyword phrase. If you can rank well for short tail keyword search strings such as entry level jobs then you should also rank well for the long tail keyword search strings such as engineering entry level jobs (we're currently #3 for that).

CollegeRecruiter.com has for years paid considerable attention to search engine optimization and we're pretty good at it. But we reached a very nice milestone today. Although the results will differ user-to-user, many and perhaps most who run a search on Google using the short tail keyword string of entry level jobs will see that Google has 3,740,000 pages in its index for that search term and CollegeRecruiter.com is in the first position and site we recently acquired, EntryLevelJobs.net, is in the second position. In addition, an interior page of CollegeRecruiter.com has been moving up the search results and should soon appear on the first page. So right now we own three of the top 15 pages for entry level jobs and soon will own three of the top 10 pages.

Continue reading "Entry Level Jobs - CollegeRecruiter.com Captures Top Two Search Results" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 18, 2008 at 10:33 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist and Apple evangelist, just announced the launch of Alltop.com, a site which helps its users explore their passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web. They've grouped these collections -- "aggregations" -- into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and, wait for it, careers.

Content from a number of my favorite bloggers are included at Alltop, including Penelope Trunk, Jason Alba, Karen Burns, G.L. Hoffman, Gautam Ghosh, Todd Raphael, Joel Cheesman, Gerry Crispin, George Lenard, Dave Mendoza, Lindsey Pollak, and Toby Dayton. Oh, and this blog is there too.

Continue reading "Alltop.com Beats Jason Goldberg's social|median to the Punch" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 12, 2008 at 10:58 AM | Leave a Comment (2)

Those who meet me often quickly detect that I have a strange accent for someone who lives in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis / Saint Paul. Some people here think that I must have grown up in New York while others more accurately put my hometown somewhere up in the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota. The latter is closer to the truth but not quite there.

I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada and became a dual citizen after moving to Minneapolis for school and the weather. One of the advantages of growing up in Canada is that you realize better than a lot of Americans do just how intertwined the countries are and aren't. Culturally they're pretty similar but they have some remarkable differences. Economically they're even more similar yet are still and probably always will be remarkably separated.

An example of that economic separation are recruiting conferences. Few American recruiters or other human resource professionals have ever ventured north of the border for a recruiting conference. That's a shame because there are some wonderful conferences in world class cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. And the lack of northern exposure shouldn't be the case because those cities are so incredibly easy to get to from just about every American city.

Continue reading "Search, Employment and Staffing Conference" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 11, 2008 at 3:37 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently wrote a blog entry about how to artfully dodge stock and often pointless questions from employers such as, "what is your greatest weakness."

But sometimes stock questions aren't silly at all and are deserving of a well thought out and delivered response. We now have a great video on our site that walks you through how to answer tough interview questions.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 10, 2008 at 2:56 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I was just reading a CollegeRecruiter.com Insights by Candidates Blog entry about how to overcome tough interview questions and it caused me to remember an answer that a friend of mine used to give interviewers who asked him what was his biggest weakness. He would answer that it was chocolate. That would end that silly line of questioning for most interviewers but for those who were better prepared and could actually explain what information they were after he would provide them with a more meaningful response.

When I interviewed for jobs in college and after graduation, it never ceased to amaze me how ill prepared both the interviewers and candidates often were. Interviewers often had little to no training and frequently knew nothing about the candidate until they had scanned their resume as the candidate was walking in the door. So rather than asking meaningful questions about the candidate's credentials, they would ask stock, open ended questions like, "describe your greatest weakness." What a waste of time for everyone in the room.

Continue reading "My Weakness is Chocolate" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on March 7, 2008 at 8:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

As first reported by Cheezhead, CollegeRecruiter.com last week acquired EntryLevelJobs.net.

We acquired ELJ when the opportunity arose primarily because of their very strong search engine rankings for just about every popular search that includes the keyword phrase "entry level jobs." We've already made some modifications to the site and more will be forthcoming over the months but for the time being most users will see few changes. The biggest change so far is that we've replaced the job postings on their site with postings from CollegeRecruiter.com so that candidates who want to apply to postings they find on ELJ will be directed to CollegeRecruiter.com to apply to the same jobs. That will increase the number of applications that our employers are receiving.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 29, 2008 at 9:28 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

There's little doubt that today's college students, most of whom are members of Gen Y, favor interacting with their friends via cell phone text messaging more than by phone and email. Phoning or even emailing a friend is seen as inefficient and even slow as you can't simultaneously and immediately communicate with many people. But does that mean that targeted email campaigns are no longer a great tool for employers and others who want to reach Gen Y? Hardly.

As stated in the Email Insider, we need to remember when we were teens and young adults and the tools that we used. Many of us got everywhere on our bicycles and even skateboards. How many of us still use those tools as our primary methods of transportation? As we age and mature, we change and we change which tools we use to best fit our new lifestyles. Given the reliance by organizations upon email, it is inevitable that Gen Y will use email more and text messaging less as more of them move into the workplace and more of those in the workplace move into positions of greater responsibility.

So what does an employer do if they want to reach a lot of college students about internship opportunities or recent graduates about entry level job openings? Well, several strategies come to mind:

Continue reading "Are Targeted Email Campaigns Dying?" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 18, 2008 at 8:18 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

What are you doing on March 4th from 1-2pm ET? Want to learn about how the new concept of social networking is impacting the traditional practice of networking? I thought you would.

I'm thrilled to be one of the panelists for the free one hour webinar hosted by Kennedy Information's RecruitingTrends.com and sponsored by LinkedIn. The moderator will be Jeanne Sturges, Managing Editor of RecruitingTrends.com. The other panelists are Lizz Pellet, CEO of EMERGE International; Hank Stringer, Chief Evangelist of ItzBig, Inc., and George Seiters, Senior Director of Marketing of LinkedIn.

You'll learn:

Continue reading "Best Practices in Recruitment Networking" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 13, 2008 at 5:24 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the questions that we're often asked by our employer, school, consumer marketing, and other clients is how we've managed to create a double opt-in database of over 10 million college students and recent graduates. Well, the answer is that is hasn't been easy and it hasn't all been our work.

CollegeRecruiter.com is part of a network of sites, most of which are job boards but some of which are used to find a new school, research scholarships, enter contests, etc. Also, those who come to CollegeRecruiter.com or many of the sites in our network may register in a variety of ways. For example, a student searching for an internship or recent graduate looking for an entry level job is likely to post their resume at our site:

Continue reading "Double Opt-in Targeted Emails, SMS, and Direct Mail Database" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 11, 2008 at 4:27 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

It was a great feeling to receive an email from Peter Weddle yesterday in which he told me that CollegeRecruiter.com had again been selected as one of the best job boards in the world by job seekers, employers, and recruiters.

The Weddle's Users Choice Awards allows those stakeholders to vote for their choice of the best from any of the 40,000 job boards based in the U.S. and 40,000 job boards based elsewhere. Only 30 of the 80,000 win the award. We were fortunate enough to win it in 2007 and are now able to announce that we repeated for 2008. To make the award even sweeter, CollegeRecruiter.com was the only college job board in the winners' circle.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 7, 2008 at 12:50 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Want to find a great new job quickly? Experts will tell you that your chances of success increase dramatically if you invest time on the front end doing some research into the appropriate industry, the organizations within that industry, the departments within those organizations, and the hiring managers within those departments.

But once you've identified those targets, how do you get those targets to pay attention to you? One way is to blog about them. Create a blog on CollegeRecruiter.com or other sites that provide free blogging space for candidates and write a series of short articles about the industry, the organization you're targeting, their vendors, their suppliers, etc. Prove to the hiring managers and other decision makers that you care deeply about their organization and that you can do and have done the work.

As reported by Karen Burns, University of Missouri student Andrew Cafourek used a blog to land a job with a marketing firm in St Louis. If he did, why not you too?

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on February 4, 2008 at 10:12 AM | Leave a Comment (1)

I had the pleasure this past fall of flying down to Dallas to tape a television show for CTN: The Energy Network. They produce a variety of training and educational shows for the natural gas industry. One of the big concerns for that industry is its rapidly aging workforce. Their recruiters and hiring managers are in the process of learning how to recruit Gen X'ers and Millennials rather than Baby Boomers.

The presentation that I did for them was designed to train their recruiters and hiring managers on how they can and should use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in their recruiting process. Want to watch? Pull up a chair.

Continue reading "How Employers Can and Should Use Facebook and MySpace" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 30, 2008 at 3:20 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a story on WNBC, the local NBC affiliate for New York City, about Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites can be dangerous to job seekers and candidates who are applying for admission to attend a college or university.

Some media outlets have published or aired a lot of doom-and-gloom and even scare mongering stories about the dangers of social networking sites so it was nice to see such a good, well balanced story being broadcast by WNBC. The reporter gives a good overview of how the sites can and should be used by high school students, college students, and others.

Continue reading "Facebook Dangers for Job Seekers: WNBC Interview" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 28, 2008 at 9:03 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Paula Santonocito recently wrote an article for OnRec in which she looked back at pivotal events which occurred in on-line recruitment in 2007 and also looked forward to what we may expect in 2008. It was nice to receive such positive recognition from Paula and OnRec about our efforts to make high quality employer-generated recruitment videos easily available to the candidates who use CollegeRecruiter.com to find internships or entry level jobs.

Paula's article highlighted the recruitment videos that we've added as a result of our partnership with CareerTV. Here's the relevant section of the article:

Continue reading "OnRec Recognizes CollegeRecruiter.com as Pioneer" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 23, 2008 at 2:20 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Tuesday's Dr. Phil Show spotlighted Facebook group 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night. It is one of the largest Facebook groups with 175,000 members.

The basic idea of the group is for female members to upload to Facebook photos of themselves after they've gotten drunk. Many of the photos are pretty harmless and just show a group of friends smiling and laughing. Few would object to those.

Continue reading "30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 17, 2008 at 6:39 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Yesterday we launched a new Facebook group, Internships and Entry Level Jobs, for those who want to raise the level of discussion on career-related topics.

Apparently there are a lot who do as we already have 56 members. Join us. Lurk if you must. Participate if you will.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 16, 2008 at 11:52 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I recently received an email from an advertising agency in which they asked on behalf of one of their clients several very good questions about cell phone text messaging advertising campaigns. Underlying the questions, as you'll see below, is the client's concern that they don't want to have us deliver their message to the cell phones of tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of college students and recent graduates and have the message annoy or even offend those Millennials.

Below are the three questions from the client as passed along to me by the advertising agency and my responses to each. Note that I've slightly edited the questions and answers, in part to protect the identity of the agency and its client.

Continue reading "SMS Ad Campaigns Target Students, Not Parents" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 16, 2008 at 7:14 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Thanks to Super Dave Mendoza, I just learned that sourcing mavin Shally Steckerl recently interviewed Jason Davis about the value of the Recruiting Roadshow Unconferences. Jason was a third party recruiter when he started Recruiting.com, sold that business to Jobster, and is now running RecruitingBlogs.com and working to increase the number of recruiters who subscribe to the excellent Fordyce Letter.

Shally's interview of Jason took place this past fall in Atlanta at the second Unconference. I had the pleasure of being one of the keynotes and spoke about how recruiters can and should use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. They mention my presentation a few times during the 11 minute interview, but what I really got a charge out of came at the end when they were interrupted by one of the attendees. Her evaluation of the conference was candid and great. Have a look:

Continue reading "The Value of Recruiting Unconferences" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 15, 2008 at 8:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

A month ago I wrote about the success stories of five cell phone text messaging (SMS) consumer marketing advertising campaigns. Today, I'd like to share with you three success stories that we had with recruitment advertising campaigns.

Continue reading "SMS Success Stories for Recruitment Advertising Campaigns" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 10, 2008 at 3:30 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Due in large part to the tremendous growth that we've seen over the past few years and the partnerships that we've built with other career sites, CollegeRecruiter.com is able to provide the largest, most robust, double opt-in, targeted email and cell phone text messaging databases in the industry.

For students attending four year schools, we have 870,525 freshmen, 1,058,004 sophomores, 699,342 juniors, 752,396 seniors, 595,274 graduate school students, 494,077 recent graduates, 256,799 unclassified (we don't know their graduation date), for a total of 4,726,417. For students attending two year schools, we have 2,290,399 freshmen, 1,707,029 seniors, 1,382,403 recent graduates, 68,924 unclassifieds, for a total of 5,448,755. The grand total is therefore 10,175,172 students and recent graduates in our database.

We've compiled a spreadsheet that breaks those numbers down by state. Feel free to download, but be prepared to be amazed.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 9, 2008 at 10:07 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

CollegeRecruiter.com just announced that it has the most internships and entry level job posting ads of any college job board thanks to our recent partnership with vertical job search engine Indeed.com.

When a candidate runs a job search on CollegeRecruiter.com, they will continue to see jobs posted by employers to CollegeRecruiter.com first but those are supplemented by jobs from Indeed. The jobs from the Indeed feed are identified in our search results as follows:

Continue reading "Internships and Entry Level Jobs: We Have the Most" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 7, 2008 at 12:30 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the most addicting on-line games I've ever played is our Stumbling Distance game. Using your mouse, you need to help the sleepy college student find his way back to his dorm room before he falls over.

Play it and share your scores with your friends. And don't blame me if you become addicted. I warned you.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 3, 2008 at 8:53 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Ever wondered how long it will take you to become a millionaire? Check out our Millionaire Maker calculator.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on January 2, 2008 at 8:51 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the most frequently asked questions that I get from bloggers is where do I find the time to write as much as I do and where do I get all of the ideas to write about? Many and perhaps most bloggers struggle to find ideas and even if they have the right ideas they struggle to find the time to write the articles. So their blogs languish and may only be updated every few weeks. Blogs that are neglected like that tend not to generate loyal readers and don't rank as highly in the search engines as they could because they aren't as active and don't have as much content.

So where does a typical blogger get more ideas and more time? Rather than trying to find the ideas and time to write your own blog entries each and every time, why not allow guest writers to take some of the load off of your shoulders? By having guest writers, you'll get free career-related content for your blog and the more content you have, the more pages you create. The more pages you have, the more likely it is that you'll have the right keyword phrase that someone types into Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any of the search engines and that will generate free traffic for your site. But even if they don't go to that new page, web sites with more pages rank higher in the search results because the search engines believe that larger sites are more likely to have the information being sought by the people using the search engines.

Continue reading "Can't Think of Anything to Write?" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 21, 2007 at 6:21 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

By Tahjia Chapman

Marketing yourself and your e-portfolio (also known as a personal portfolio) is one career goal worth planning. If you want to get your dream job, place your e-portfolio before prospective employers and possible clients. You may not be familiar with internet marketing, but we have you covered. We have compiled a list of the top five methods of increasing traffic, visibility, and importance of an e-portfolio for recent college grads and students. You must work on these tips to build a foundation then add more link building strategies for more exposure.

Why should you focus on marketing your e-portfolio?

Your e-portfolio is one marketing tool that sells your skills to an employer. An e-portfolio places you before an audience with information of who you are, why they should know, and how they can contact you for job interviews. It is important to use your e-portfolio as an introduction for prospective employers by placing your most valuable work before their eyes. The marketing plan for your e-portfolio will include all five marketing strategies to gain interests from future employers.

Continue reading "Five Ways To Market Your E-Portfolio" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 17, 2007 at 9:51 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I just found out from Jason Davis at RecruitingBlogs.com that this blog was nominated as one of the best recruiting blogs. Voting begins today. If you like the work that we do, please vote for the CollegeRecruiter.com Blog.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 14, 2007 at 6:53 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

What goes from zero to number two in a year? If you guessed the Dallas Cowboys then you've got a good imagination but you're way off base. No, what goes from zero to number two in a year is our targeted SMS (cell phone text messaging) campaign product because a year ago we did virtually zero dollars in sales with it and it will close 2007 as our number two product behind targeted email campaigns.

One of the most frequent questions that we get from potential clients of our SMS product is how have other organizations used it with success. Here are some examples of campaigns delivered either by CollegeRecruiter.com or one of our network partners:

Continue reading "SMS (Cell Phone Text Messaging) Success Stories" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 11, 2007 at 12:20 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the only certainties with on-line marketing is that there are no certainties. It is very fluid in the sense that almost everything changes all of the time. That makes on-line marketing fun for those of us immersed in it but at times frustrating.

Fortunately, many organizations are constantly studying the on-line marketing space and sharing their findings. One aspect that is often studied is the best day to deploy a targeted email campaign where the list owner, such as CollegeRecruiter.com, delivers an email on behalf of a client. We deliver multiple campaigns per week and sometimes per day to tens of thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of candidates. All have double opted in, meaning that they signed up to receive the emails and then confirmed that request. All can remove themselves from the list with a single click. Both are the highest standards in the industry. But I digress.

Continue reading "Wednesday Afternoons Best for Targeted Email Campaigns" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 10, 2007 at 9:37 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Small businesses can leverage the recruitment process by integrating successful internship programs into their companies. The process is simple: develop an internship outline with objectives, provide students with career related experience, and recognize students whom excel within the program. The list is quite short, but the most innovative internships withhold these three necessities. Small businesses can use an internship to create a funnel of talented recruiters for future employment with their company.

Develop a program with learning objectives.

The first step to integrating a successful internship is by developing a program with learning objectives. While planning, the company must address its needs by surveying current staff of strengths and weaknesses. The survey will pinpoint aspects of the small business that needs improvement through human resource’s recruiting efforts. The best way to outline learning objectives (or milestones) is by evaluating the staff in each department of the small business. Without an understanding what the small business needs, the recruiting process may become blurred. With this said, successful internships must provide a clear objective so recruits experience career options the company offers.

Continue reading "Three Steps for Small Businesses to Integrate Internships to Develop Candidates for Future Employment" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 7, 2007 at 5:31 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Do you want to attract more visitors to your career site but don't have the budget for a big advertising or public relations campaign? No problem.

One of the most efficient and effective ways to attract highly targeted visitors to any web site is by increasing the number of visitors who find you in the organic (free) results of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. But how do you increase the number of those visitors? Make your web site come up higher in the results so more of your targeted visitors will see your site and click through. Two of the best ways of making your site come up higher in the search results are to add more content to your site and to increase the number of links to your site.

Continue reading "How to Get More Traffic to Your Career Site" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 6, 2007 at 7:50 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Nice to see that a poll that we ran showed that college students who are hunting for internships and recent graduates who are looking for entry level jobs and other career opportunities are more optimistic in December than they were in November. Perhaps all of the doom and gloom in the mainstream media is overblown.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 6, 2007 at 6:06 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the benefits of our partnership with CareerTV is that I've been able to learn a lot about how employers can and should use recruitment videos to help them hire the best possible candidates. So I was delighted when I recently read in Interbiznet's Electronic Recruiting News some great tips from Helen Luttemo, Director of Public Relations for CareerTV:

Continue reading "Best Practices for Recruitment Videos" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 5, 2007 at 6:40 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

I was honored to be offered the opportunity to be part of the presentation by Bill Vick for this week's Dallas Recruiting Roadshow Unconference. Bill, who is always looking for new and better ways of getting the job done, used webcams and Skype Video to record the segment with me and the other "panelists."

For my segment, Bill interviewed me about how recruiters can and should use social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Couldn't be at the Dallas event? No problem. Here's my presentation:

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 4, 2007 at 3:51 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of the skills that is critical to the success of any entrepreneur or intrapreneur is the ability to see around corners. That is, to be better able to predict the relevant future than your competitors. Those who have the skill are at a huge advantage as they are able to better position themselves and their organizations than are their competitors. Corporate recruiters who want to peer around the corner to see what practices will soon be popular need only look at what the various branches of the U.S. military do, including the U.S. Army.

For decades, the Army has used the promise of money for college as a recruiting tool. But starting this January, their message will change. Rather than promising tens of thousands of dollars in money for college, the Army will instead promise up to $40,000 towards the purchase of a home or the creation of a business. And rather than directing the messages at the potential enlistees, the Army will direct a significant portion of the messages at the parents and other adult "influencers" of the enlistees. "If you want to get a soldier, you have to go through mom, and moms want to know what kind of future their children will have when they leave the Army," Lt. Col. Jeff Sterling, the program's architect, told the Wall Street Journal.

Continue reading "Army Targets Influencers: Why Don't All Employers?" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on December 4, 2007 at 1:43 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Great news out of Texas: the Dallas Recruiting Roadshow Unconference is sold out. My congratulations to Ami Givertz and John Sumser for organizing such a great line-up of presenters and marketing it so well to recruiters and other human resource professionals. CollegeRecruiter.com is proud to be one of the sponsors and looks forward to continuing to partner with these gentlemen.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 30, 2007 at 7:21 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Paul DeBettignies a/k/a The Minnesota Headhunter has done it again. No, I'm not talking about his almost completely irrational devotion to University of Minnesota football. I'm talking about his great job in organizing the second Minnesota Recruiting Unconference.

The conference kicks off (pun intended) tomorrow morning at 8am and concludes at 2pm. In between, the attendees will be treated to breakfast, some great networking opportunities, great speakers, some great networking opportunities, lunch, some great networking opportunities, and then some more great networking opportunities. Did I mention that there's no charge and no selling from the podium?

I was privileged to be one of the presenters for the first conference. This time around, CollegeRecruiter.com is privileged to be one of the sponsors. If you're within driving distance of the Best Buy headquarters in suburban Minneapolis tomorrow, you need to sign up right away and join us.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 29, 2007 at 3:06 PM | Leave a Comment (2)

I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new monthly service, the CollegeRecruiter.com Job Seeker Confidence Index. Each month we'll poll hundreds of candidates to better understand their level of optimism about the job market. We'll use the same question and offer the same answer options each month so that we'll be able to understand, over time, whether candidates are becoming more or less optimistic about their prospects of finding a new internship, entry level job, or other career opportunity.

We just posted the results for November and they look quite good. Almost 75 percent of respondents believe that it will take them three or fewer months to find a new job.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 27, 2007 at 9:37 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

We just launched a new application on Facebook that allows you to send a free gift through Facebook to your friends, family, enemies, Donald Duck, etc.

The Holiday Gifts application works somewhat like the gifts application that Facebook created eons ago except that they charge $1 per gift sent and we charge nothing. In either case, the gifts are icons that appear on the profile page of the recipient. In addition, when you send a gift to a friend, that is noted on your page and theirs so that those who are friends of yours and the recipient of your gift will see that you are using our application and that makes it more likely that they will want to use it too. Also, when you send a gift to someone who does not have the application already installed, then they will need to install it. When they do, they can easily send gifts to their friends. So the entire process is designed to be viral.

So what does CollegeRecruiter.com get out of the new Holiday Gifts application on Facebook? If it takes off, we'll get a boost to our traffic as our logo appears on the application page. The logo gives us both branding for long-term benefits and it is linked to our home page for a short-term traffic boost.

Install it today. Give it a whirl. Add a comment below with your feedback. We're listening.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 20, 2007 at 2:38 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

On Wednesday, November 28th, I'll have the pleasure of serving on a panel with Jason Davis, founder of Recruiting.com and RecruitingBlogs.com; Matt Martone, manager at Yahoo! HotJobs; and Craig Silverman, EVP of sales & marketing at HireAbility. Together we'll discuss topics which should be of great interest to virtually everyone in the recruiting space including how to start blogging and increase your candidate flow, how to quickly drive more traffic to your web site, why there are already 100 million blogs, how you can stand out in your niche, and more.

Interested? Follow the instructions below to sign-up today.

Continue reading "Secrets to Blogging for Recruiting Professionals" »

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 16, 2007 at 6:23 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Just heard from Jason Davis that the most recent entries to the Recruiting Blogswap free content exchange program are now being featured on the home page of his well regarded RecruitingBlogswap.com site.

The Recruiting Blogswap is a great way for recruiters and other human resource professionals to share their opinions by authoring articles which are then automatically distributed by the Blogswap software to the next publisher in line. The publishers are recruiting bloggers who want to provide more content and more diverse content to their readers. There is no charge to participate. We run this program as a service to the recruiting community and it also builds links back to CollegeRecruiter.com as each entry includes a "sponsored by" link at the bottom. Win-win-win.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 13, 2007 at 9:29 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Facebook just broadened their offerings again. These guys never sleep. When Facebook was launched just a few years ago, it was designed to be an on-line alternative to the school yearbook for Harvard students. Then it spread to other Ivy League schools, then other colleges and universities, then high schools, then non-educational organizations, and then to everyone. But through that entire time the only profile pages that could be created for free were those of individuals. So you, your friend Mandy, and your cousin Betsy could have a Facebook page, but organizations such as CollegeRecruiter.com could not. Until now.

Visit the just launched CollegeRecruiter.com page on Facebook and become a "fan" so that you will be the first to know what is happening with our Facebook efforts, including several new applications that we're finalizing and will be releasing over the coming weeks.

Posted by Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com on November 9, 2007 at 9:55 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

One of my favorite people to meet up with at recruiting conferences, by phone, via email, smoke signals, whatever is Dennis Smith. Most of those who blog about recruiting in what has become known as the recruiting blogosphere know Dennis as the face of T-Mobile. No longer. Dennis has jumped to WorldLink.

So what is WorldLink? It is a global, se