Is Handshake better than College Recruiter?

Handshake is one of a relatively small number of career service office management platforms globally. These sites sell web-based software to college and university career service offices that allow employers to post jobs, video interview students, and schedule on-campus interviews.

For years, when you talked with employers using Handshake, they’d typically justify their decision in three ways: (1) the cost to advertise a job on Handshake was $0; (2) it allowed them to target schools; and (3) the cost to advertise a job on Handshake was $0. Oh, wait, I guess that’s really two reasons but cost was, by far, the most common reason that we would hear when employers would tell us why they were advertising their jobs on Handshake.

After years of generating revenue only from selling the software to the schools, Handshake started to also charge its employer customers. Well, some of its employer customers. Until very recently employers who just wanted to post a job here or a job there or send a small number of messages to candidates through the Handshake system could continue to do so for free. Even today, the cost of advertising a single job on Handshake is $0 through what it calls its Core product, although it describes that as being suitable for individuals and businesses who want to “try” the platform. I infer from the use of the word “try” that Handshake is trying to gently send the message to these, ahem, customers that they’re likely to get what they paid for: nothing.

The vast majority of students are hired by large, enterprise-level employers. These employers almost all hire at scale, meaning dozens to hundreds a year, with a small number hiring into the thousands. According to what we hear from our customers, the cost to a large employer to use Handshake is typically $100,000 to $250,000 with all contracts being annual. Is that worth it? The answer is, it depends.

If your goal is to use one platform to advertise your early career jobs then paying Handshake $100,000 to $250,000 a year might be worthwhile. You can check a box and tell your manager that you advertised your internships and jobs for new grads. But is that what your manager wants, or does your manager want to know how many applied? How many were interviewed? How many were hired? Probably one or more of those, at least if they’re data-driven.

A problem that a lot of large employers have when it comes to measuring the return on investment (ROI) they get from Handshake is that Handshake is only integrated with the Greenhouse and Workday applicant tracking systems (ATS). When candidates apply on Handshake or click from there to your ATS without any kind of integration, you won’t have an accurate way of knowing who applied and, therefore, won’t know how many were interviewed or hired.

Enter College Recruiter. At College Recruiter, we believe that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career…and that it should be easy and inexpensive for employers to hire them. We invested a lot of time and energy over the years to build a great process that allows our employer customers to see, with just a few clicks, which candidates went from CollegeRecruiter.com to the ATS, which applied, which were interviewed, and which were hired. Our integration with every major ATS allows you to log into your ATS (or have your HRIS person do so) to run these reports, so you won’t be logging into your ATS to run some reports and into CollegeRecruiter.com to run others.

As you’ll be able to see how many from College Recruiter applied, were interviewed, and were hired, you’ll know 24/7 what your ROI is…and the vast majority of our customers choose to work with us on a month-to-month basis. We want you to have the flexibility to cancel without being locked in for a year like at Handshake as almost all of our customers advertise with us month after month after month and many of them increase their budgets one or more times a year…because they can see that we’re delivering an excellent return on their investment.

College Recruiter chooses to be transparent with its employer customers regarding the candidates that we’re delivering so that those employer customers can easily see the value we’re delivering. When you’re looking at our indirect or direct competitors, ask yourself why they don’t. I suspect that you already know the answer.