How College Recruiter Scaled Globally with Performance-Based Job Advertising – with Steven Rothberg

Introduction

In today’s competitive job board landscape, standing still isn’t an option. That’s why this episode of the JBoard Interview Series is one every job board founder, operator, or recruitment marketer should tune into.

We sat down with Steven Rothberg, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of College Recruiter, a global job board focused on early-career talent. With over two decades of experience, Steven shares how one light-bulb moment led to a major shift in his business model—and how performance-based advertising (Cost Per Click and Cost Per Application) became the key to College Recruiter’s growth.

Whether you’re new to job boards or looking to scale yours to the next level, this conversation is packed with real-world lessons, actionable insights, and strategic takeaways.

Watch the Full Interview

5 Actionable Takeaways from the Interview

1. The Lightbulb Moment: Move from Per-Post to Per-Candidate

Steven recalls the exact walk where it hit him: why charge per post when you can charge per candidate? This shift to performance-based pricing allowed College Recruiter to scale volume, maintain profit margins, and offer value-aligned pricing to clients. The takeaway? Billing by outcome, not listing, creates win-win dynamics.

"Rather than charging per post, we should charge per candidate... we could maintain our profit margins and dial up the volume."

2. Cost Per Application (CPA) Is Surging Past Cost Per Click (CPC)

While both CPA and CPC offer more transparency than traditional listings, CPA adoption is accelerating faster. Why? Employers increasingly want guaranteed applications, not just traffic. College Recruiter saw this firsthand as their revenue tipped toward CPA in 2024.

“2024 was the first year where most of our revenue came from cost-per-application.”

3. Conversion Data is Your Growth Engine

Steven emphasized that without real-time conversion tracking, job boards are flying blind. Knowing how many clicks turn into applications allows you to optimize campaigns, prove ROI, and become a strategic partner to employers.

“Without conversion data, you’re wasting your client’s money—and in the long run, they’ll stop working with you.”

4. Don’t Force Clients to Change Overnight

Transitioning from traditional job postings to performance-based pricing took College Recruiter nearly a decade. They didn’t force clients to change—they educated them over time. The result? Long-term retention and smooth adoption.

“We didn’t go all-in. We gave clients time to adapt, and that helped us retain them.”

5. Automation Is the Only Way to Scale

With millions of jobs live at any given time, manual campaign management is impossible. College Recruiter is investing heavily in automation to optimize campaigns, spot underperformance, and scale globally.

“We’re handling 3 million jobs at any given time. Automation is critical to manage that intelligently.”

Conclusion

Steven’s journey with College Recruiter is a masterclass in job board evolution, pricing innovation, and sustainable growth. His early adoption of performance-based models and focus on data-driven decision-making has set College Recruiter apart in a crowded market.

Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:02.196)

Stephen Rothberg, thank you so much for joining me today.

Steven Rothberg (00:05.176)

Martin, awesome to see you again. Looking forward to the discussion.

Martyn Redstone (00:09.064)

Yeah, me too. Me too. So, so let's jump straight into it then, shall we? So can you share a little bit about your, professional background and what led you to start college recruiter?

Steven Rothberg (00:20.27)

Yeah. So, well, first of all, you're assuming that I'm a professional. but, and I am. So, I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada. for those who aren't familiar with Canadian geography, it's right in the center of the country. One of the coldest places in one of the coldest countries in the world. I like to say that I moved to Minnesota where I've lived most of my life. I'm the only person who moved to Minnesota in the history of the world for the weather. so.

Martyn Redstone (00:23.604)

I've only ever known that. I've only ever known that.

Steven Rothberg (00:50.252)

that'll, for the listeners who don't know me, it's like, okay, baby, buckle up, here we go. I founded the company that College Recruiter grew out of while I was working as a lawyer. I went to undergraduate in Winnipeg, came here to Minneapolis, went to law school, and I was practicing in my first year after law school, and a friend of mine tried to get me to...

basically rejoin a small business that I had started when I was in university and that he had taken over. My entrepreneurial bug was reignited for better for worse. And so I started this business on the side while working as a lawyer and then went full time in the business way back in 1992. I think Abraham Lincoln might've been Garfield was president at the time. So it was a bit of a different era.

Martyn Redstone (01:30.76)

Okay.

Steven Rothberg (01:42.126)

A few years into that, I wanted, we were publishing like, it was a very micro business, had like one or two people working with me. And we were doing things like publishing maps of college and university campuses, selling the advertising around the borders. Those did a really nice job of hitting the incoming students. In the US, we would call them freshmen. But what they did a terrible job of hitting the students who were graduating, what in the US are called seniors.

Martyn Redstone (01:51.924)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (01:58.644)

Thank you.

Steven Rothberg (02:12.024)

So I wanted to come up with a publication that would hit those graduating seniors. And what those people need more than anything else is employment. So came up with an employment magazine. After a couple of years, there were four regionalized versions distributed by about 250 schools in the country. And then this thing called the internet came along. And we had a high school kid who was working with us part-time, maintaining our network when that was a thing also.

Martyn Redstone (02:12.072)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (02:41.006)

Build the very first version of our website cost whopping $3,000. We're now on version, I think seven or eight, which sounds like a lot, but over that many years really, really isn't. Cause typically you kind of tear down and rebuild a website every few years. So College Recruiter is a job search site. We're not general, but we are global.

So we're a niche site focused on what we call early careers, basically anything that requires zero to five years of experience. So when we're talking to employers about the kinds of jobs that they should advertise with us, it's part-time seasonal internship, apprenticeship, and anything that they might describe as entry-level, which a lot of times actually entry-level jobs

Martyn Redstone (03:08.67)

Okay.

Martyn Redstone (03:17.684)

Okay.

Steven Rothberg (03:36.758)

it'll say their say it's entry level and then it'll say two plus years of experience required. And we can have a conversation about the about the logic of that or lack thereof. But our customers are mostly Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, some other job boards. And we are in dozens of countries, slash markets around the world. We operate in five or six different currencies, which is real fun.

Martyn Redstone (03:40.722)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (03:51.348)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (04:06.222)

We're heavily programmatic and now starting last year, 2024, 100 % of the jobs on our site are now performance based, cost per click or cost per application.

Martyn Redstone (04:22.236)

Okay. that's really interesting because there's a few things that I wanted to talk to you about today. And I know that you're a, a key proponent of performance based, pricing as well. And I think that it'd be great to kind of get an overview of that. You know, I know that you're a very, one of the leading voices in CPQ, CPC, CPQA, all those kinds of acronyms that are out there around performance based.

Steven Rothberg (04:30.99)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (04:49.684)

M-O-U-S-E, uh-huh, yep, all, yep.

Martyn Redstone (04:51.86)

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's a theme tune there. And yeah, so it would be great to kind of understand the evolution that you went through as a business, as an organization to go from time-based advertising to performance-based advertising. So why don't you talk me through how that evolution came about and how it's gone.

Steven Rothberg (05:03.842)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (05:17.454)

Yeah. Yeah, no problem. In 20 until 2014, so just a little over 10 years ago now. Until then, all of the ads that we ran were what we called traditional duration based, know, $200 pounds euros, you know, pick your currency of choice per 30 days. The ads virtually all ran.

for the full 30 days, occasionally you would get an employer that might log in and deactivate a posting earlier. And usually the reason for that was that maybe they had received 40 applications and they were very confident that they had three fantastic candidates and they didn't want to go from 40 to 80 or 120 applications. So they would deactivate sooner. In 2014, within just

Martyn Redstone (06:07.284)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (06:16.93)

days, I received two calls and I was doing a lot of the sales, not all of them, but I was doing mostly sales for our larger clients at the time. I got two calls. One was from Uber, which most of your listeners know, you know, with the world's biggest ride share company. And they were using us to help them quote unquote, hire drivers, basically students, recent grads who wanted to do some gig freelance work.

Martyn Redstone (06:29.118)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (06:39.028)

Okay.

Steven Rothberg (06:44.168)

And the other call was from Aflac, which is a really big insurance company. If you're in a market where Aflac exists, you know them by their ads, they have a duck and the duck goes Aflac. so it's, they're, they're cute. They're funny, but it's insurance. So it's not really cute. It's not really funny, but anyway, the both in both cases, the employers had what we called the time on all you can eat package. was an annual.

unlimited job posting package for $12,500 a year, the employer got to post as many jobs as they wanted to. So for an employer like Afflac that hires thousands of people a year, Uber, which hires hundreds of thousands of drivers a year, really good deal. And the question both of them asked was, we're spending $12,500 a year with you. If we paid you four times as much, could you deliver four times as many candidates to us?

Martyn Redstone (07:28.498)

Makes sense.

Steven Rothberg (07:42.368)

interesting question. So, yep, very logical. mean, both of them clearly were willing to pay for value, which is a really great thing to have in a client. And, you know, when you run your own business, if a client comes to you and says, I want to give you more money, help me do that, you tend to figure out a way of making that happen. So I noodled on it for a few days.

Martyn Redstone (07:44.496)

logical yeah.

Martyn Redstone (07:53.78)

Absolutely.

Martyn Redstone (08:08.052)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (08:11.938)

couldn't really figure out a way that we could maintain profitability when it came to those campaigns and also deliver four times as many candidates. So my wife, who's our CEO and I, went away. There's a wonderful little city about two and a half hours north of here called Duluth. It's right on the shore of Lake Superior. And we went away for a couple of days to just sort of like...

Martyn Redstone (08:23.764)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (08:37.932)

have an offsite, clear our minds, and try to figure this out. And I can remember to this day exactly where we were walking when the light bulb went off. Rather than charging per post, we should charge per candidate. We weren't first to do that, but it was still pretty early on. Indeed was just starting to get traction. Google was making most of its money from pay-per-click advertising.

Martyn Redstone (08:58.42)

Mmm.

Steven Rothberg (09:05.517)

But it was still doing a lot of CPM or duration based or impression based, I should say, display advertising. But if we charged per candidate, then we could maintain our profit margins and we could dial up the volume and we could deliver two times, three times, four times, ten times the candidates and just charge two, three, four, ten, you know, ten times the amount and the clients happy and we're happy. So how do you charge per candidate?

Martyn Redstone (09:11.422)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (09:34.39)

I saw two paths. One was to charge per click. Candidate sees the job ad on College Recruiter, clicks our Apply button to go to the employer's site to apply. The other one was to charge per application. Either the candidate applies using a form that we would host, and then we deliver the data to them in the background, or they go over to the employer's ATS or some other kind of career page and they apply there, and then we get some kind of data back from the employer.

Martyn Redstone (09:43.913)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (10:04.238)

could be manual, could be automated, whatever. And so one of the clients, and I don't remember which one it was which, but one went with pay-per-click and the other one went with pay-per-application, which was kind of nice because we had a bit of an informal A-B test going on. And we knocked it out of the park. I would love to say that we had fantastic technology, but the reality is we kind of built it with chewing gum.

Martyn Redstone (10:21.62)

Absolutely.

Steven Rothberg (10:33.038)

band-aids and bailing wire. It was just very, very manual. It was not scalable because it took a lot of staff time to kind of maintain it, watch the quantity. I we literally had to manually inactivate the jobs when we hit their budgets, stuff like that. But it was proof of concept. So you know from the work that you do the expression MVP, minimally viable product. And that's

Martyn Redstone (10:51.026)

Yeah. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (11:00.05)

Yes, absolutely.

Steven Rothberg (11:01.568)

In hindsight, what we did, we didn't call it that. We didn't think of it that way. We thought of it as a pilot, but that's essentially what we did. So it worked really well. Both of those employers continued to work with us and we could see that there weren't that many sites out there that were pricing on a click or application basis. And then we did something that Martin, think was kind of smart. We didn't go all in.

We didn't say to our existing customers, we're a round peg, you're a square hole, you need to become a round hole in order to continue to work with us. Because we had a lot of clients that were very happy on a traditional duration basis. So why would we want to stop that working with them? We felt performance-based was better, better for them, better for us, better for the candidate. But that's our opinion.

Maybe it actually wasn't better for the employer. Maybe they weren't well set up for it. Maybe they are perfectly happy with what they were getting. So it took about a decade. I think it took eight or nine years until the last of those employers either changed or stopped using us. It was great. It really helped us scale tremendously. And yeah, without a doubt, something you said a couple of minutes ago too about I'm a big proponent.

Martyn Redstone (12:19.741)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (12:25.847)

You could definitely call me an evangelist when it comes to performance based pricing.

Martyn Redstone (12:30.836)

Yeah, absolutely and I and I totally get that um, and I think that's great that you that you you didn't go all in because Like you said, you know, there's no point in trying to Try to break something that's already, you know, that's already working reinvent the wheel whatever you want to call it um so so so was that you know, 10 eight nine ten years of education and constant engagement, you know, how did you

Steven Rothberg (12:55.466)

yeah.

Martyn Redstone (12:58.772)

How did you bring everybody over, you know, eventually? it interesting? And also another kind of follow-up question to that. You said that what you did was a bit of an informal kind of A-B test between CosmoClick and CosmoApplication. I know it was a while ago and we've all done, you know, we've all breathed since. Any insights on what you learned from that kind of informal A-B test? know, what were the kind of pros and cons of each of those methodologies?

Steven Rothberg (13:07.278)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (13:12.024)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (13:28.418)

Yeah, the well, I'll tackle that second one first. So the cost, both cost per click and cost per application overall for the vast majority of customers have worked has been far better for them and therefore far better for us than traditional duration based because we're better able to match up their hiring needs with what we deliver to them. We don't.

Martyn Redstone (13:34.931)

Hmm.

Martyn Redstone (13:57.011)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (13:57.358)

We don't deliver a thousand candidates to an employer that wants 50 or the other way around. When they hit their budget, we stopped delivering candidates and not until then. that's been good. 2024, so last year we reached the tipping point where the majority of our revenues and profits came from cost per application. So cost per click, it didn't drop, but it had a sort of a slower growth curve. It was more flat.

Martyn Redstone (14:24.361)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (14:25.986)

than cost per application. There's been a significant increase in the adoption of cost per application in the markets that use performance-based pricing. It's growing faster than cost per click.

Martyn Redstone (14:39.156)

Do you think that that's because, and just to kind of be thinking about it, do you think that that's because clients don't trust their own career site to convert? So cost per click would be, I'm hitting the apply button, I'm being taken through to the career site, to the ATS site, and then it's down to the candidate to then convert into an application down to their.

Steven Rothberg (14:48.802)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (14:55.491)

Hmph.

Steven Rothberg (15:05.698)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (15:06.064)

employee branding, their conversion techniques. Whereas if they're paying for cost per application, they're almost guaranteeing that number of applications and cost per ticket isn't guaranteeing the applications. Do you think it's got something to do with, yeah, with employers not trusting their own conversions?

Steven Rothberg (15:16.547)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (15:25.454)

I that there are a number of reasons. And I think for the listeners who sort of aren't familiar with how abysmal the conversion rates are, it's probably be helpful for them to know. So, Abcast, which I think has better data on this than any other organization in the world by far, and is great about publishing it. Generally, what they find is that about 4 %

Martyn Redstone (15:45.385)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (15:53.486)

candidates that go to an employer's ATS or other kind of a career site will convert into a completed application. So 96 % of the candidates that job boards or other sourcing partners send to an employer's site do not convert into an applicant. That's horrible. It's probably a great topic for another day. So

Martyn Redstone (16:19.547)

Absolutely.

Steven Rothberg (16:21.024)

What we found with cost per application and in terms of the adoption, cost per click is a lot easier to communicate to a client. It's a lot easier to track because we don't need the help of the employer or other advertiser advertising agency, staffing agency, whatever. We don't need their help to track that. But if we're going to deliver the candidate to the ATS and they apply there, we do need the help.

Martyn Redstone (16:30.248)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (16:48.83)

of the employer or advertiser to tell us, yeah, that click converted into an application. We don't actually need to know who it was. We don't need to know that Cindy Jones just applied or to what job. We just need the signal back. It's usually done with a pixel that's dropped onto their confirmation page or some kind of server to server integration. There are some other mechanisms that a small number of our clients use, but those are the two main ones.

Martyn Redstone (16:55.507)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (17:05.384)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (17:17.804)

I think one of the big reasons that that cost per application is growing so rapidly is that the employer's technology is improving so rapidly. They have gotten past the vast majority of them, the unfounded concerns about dropping a pixel onto a confirmation page and what that might mean for security reasons. The ATS that they're using today are light years ahead.

of the ATS that they were using 10 years ago, even if it's the same organization. Just to kind of pick up an example, because I'll use smart recruiters because smart recruiters was always good. Now they're better. And 10 years ago, we probably would have had no difficulty putting a pixel onto a smart recruiter's confirmation page if the client had said it was okay.

Martyn Redstone (17:50.996)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (18:01.608)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (18:15.308)

Which would have meant that probably we would not be able to get a pixel placed on the confirmation page because the client probably would have said no today. Same ATS same client that client would say yes and smart recruiters has made it a lot easier. I don't actually know that, but I'm pretty darn confident they probably have a really, really good process in place where a decade ago it was probably unusual and sort of was kind of probably a custom thing for for them. So.

Martyn Redstone (18:22.764)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (18:31.86)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (18:44.632)

For the job boards that are looking for conversion data, it's way easier now than it was a decade ago. And whether you're cost per click, cost per application, traditional, duration-based, something else, without the conversion data, you're really flying blind. You have no idea which of the candidates are converting, which of them aren't. So you're wasting your client's money is essentially what's happening. And in the long run, they're going to stop working with you. If they're not getting the right people in the right amounts,

in the right time, they're going to go someplace else. Another reason I think that cost per application is growing so much faster than cost per click, the analogy I use is telephones. So in industrialized countries like the UK where you're at, the US where I'm at, we've had landlines for 100 years or more.

Martyn Redstone (19:29.96)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (19:41.806)

in almost every home and business in our countries. That's not true in literally most of the world. And in lesser developed countries, a lot of areas still don't have landlines. But smartly, what they did, like countries like Indonesia, which have some of the biggest populations in the world, countries like that, they skipped landlines.

Martyn Redstone (19:46.142)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (20:06.862)

in most of the country. Like you go into the big cities and yeah, the big cities, they've had landlines for a hundred years, but in the rural areas, not. So rather than stringing a bunch of copper into rural villages, they put up cell phone towers. And South Korea did kind of the same thing. And so their cellular data service is light years ahead of what we have in the U.S. and I think also the UK. And Cosper application reminds me of that.

Martyn Redstone (20:07.177)

Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (20:32.916)

Absolutely.

Steven Rothberg (20:37.044)

Because a lot of job boards that were slow to adopt cost per click or never adopted it, skipped it. We work with a number of job boards in the UK and in the EU that went straight from offering only traditional duration based to now also offering cost per application or sometimes or they or some some of the newer ones, they're only cost per application.

Martyn Redstone (21:00.349)

I see.

Steven Rothberg (21:05.495)

So some of those job boards that we work with, they don't even offer cost per click. They just skipped it.

Martyn Redstone (21:11.59)

Okay, interesting. cost per click, cost per application, particularly cost per application sounds like a fantastic business model for a job board. So if I, if I had a job board, already horrible. Okay. So

Steven Rothberg (21:22.786)

Yeah.

Or or really really horrible it's one or the other. It's it's it's there's a lot of risk there but yeah.

Martyn Redstone (21:34.47)

Okay. And, and, and actually that, was going to be my next question was, know, if I was a job board and I was, you know, and I was, you know, either starting up my job board journey as a founder, or I was, you know, a few years into that journey and building up a nice business on the traditional kind of duration based, what would I have to think about if I wanted to go down the route of CPA, of cost per application, you know, what are the pros and cons? And if I decided to, to, to start experimenting with it,

Steven Rothberg (21:37.272)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (21:57.933)

Mmm.

Martyn Redstone (22:04.244)

How would I go about doing that?

Steven Rothberg (22:05.688)

Yeah. So again, one of the first things that I would do is I would have a look at the app cast data. And it'll give you a pretty good handle on what those costs per application ranges and medians are in different occupational fields. They vary significantly. Some occupational fields like, health care, what you're paid per application can easily be double, triple, quadruple what you are in other occupational fields.

like retail. So you want to make sure that your pricing is right. You want to take a look at how many candidates do you need to get to your job ad to convert into, say, 100 clicks to convert into X applications and just kind of follow your metrics. Some job boards in some countries, in some markets have a much higher conversion rate. And so their cost of delivering an application is going to be a lot lower.

So you can imagine if 10 % of the candidates that are going to your job ad convert into an application, then your cost is a lot lower to generate that application than your competitor who's only converting 2%. You've got five times as many candidates converting into an application. You can still charge the same because the employer doesn't care how much it's costing you, but you can make five times as much money. So the conversion.

Martyn Redstone (23:25.832)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (23:35.074)

Data that you have or should have on your own is massively important. If you're doing a poor job of converting candidates into applications, then it's going to be harder for you to charge that way. The other thing is, like for us, because we're so heavily skewed towards large employers, they don't want candidates applying on our site. They want them applying. They require them in many cases to apply on the ATS. And if that happens, now you run into a problem like we had with one with a

an early client, not one of those two, but it was a big rental car company. They said they were unable, I think it was more unwilling to share conversion data with us in real time. They would not put a pixel on, there was no server to server integration, they claimed security reasons, which I think that security is spelled BS in that context.

Martyn Redstone (24:21.801)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (24:27.55)

hahahaha

Steven Rothberg (24:30.69)

but we were unable to get data from them except once a month. They would basically send us an email and they would say last month X number of candidates converted into applicants and so send us an invoice for blank. And the numbers were always so low as to be unbelievable. Like we didn't believe the accuracy. Now this was a Fortune 50 company.

Martyn Redstone (24:45.853)

Mmm.

Steven Rothberg (24:57.42)

We knew the people leading talent acquisition, good people, ethical people. Their website was well designed. It's like, what is the problem here? And so we ended up having a meeting. actually went to their headquarters, sat down with their talent acquisition people. It was in a conference room. There were probably 30 of us around the conference room. Most of the people were recruiters. And one guy sticks up his hand. He's like, well, if the candidate comes from college recruiter and

Martyn Redstone (25:08.948)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (25:26.17)

I changed the source in the ATS to reflect that I talked to that person on campus. Does college recruiter still get credited with that? And there's this pregnant pause in the room. And that was the problem is that the individual recruiters were also talking to some of the same candidates on campus, and they were changing the source from college recruiter to campus and therefore we weren't getting paid.

So lesson learned. need, if you're gonna send the candidate to the ATS, you've got to get real time conversion data, even if it's not being used by your system automatically, but you need that for sort of verification so that you can be looking at that data. Yeah, exactly. Don't rely on self reporting because no matter how ethical the person is that you're talking to,

Martyn Redstone (26:15.848)

Don't rely on self-reporting basically. Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (26:25.176)

there are probably gonna be some hidden system issues there in how it's attributed. In this case, a recruiter who wasn't, they weren't being dishonest, they weren't lying to us, they just didn't know what the ramifications of that action was. Nobody had thought of it. So real-time conversion data makes a huge difference. If I can take another minute, I can share like a bit of a story with you. a military branch, they spend,

Martyn Redstone (26:41.682)

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (26:51.24)

Yeah, absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (26:55.246)

probably hundreds of millions of dollars a year in recruitment marketing. They, for the first year, maybe two with us, they were spending about $40,000 a month. And it was on a cost per click basis. We were using our data to report and to bill off of, and everything's fine. And then they said, hey, we just moved over to this new

career site. We can now drop your pixel onto our confirmation page. Would you like for us to do that?" And we're like, hell yeah. So they did that. And for the first time, we were able to see how many of our clicks were converting into applicants. And the number was pretty consistent with what AppCast was reporting, about 4%, something like that. So, but we could now tell in real time

Which candidates, what was the profile of them? Where did we source them from? What content were they looking at? What job postings were they looking at? And within about, I think it was three weeks, we were sending to them the same number of clicks and they were converting four times as well. So we effectively dropped their cost per application by three quarters. Like they were getting four times as many applicants from us.

for the same money. And it wasn't costing us anything more to do that. We were just able to do a better job of managing the candidate flow. So that's caused them to continue to renew with us and they're spending more with us. So it's a win for the candidate. The candidate's more likely to see a job that they're more likely to be interested in. It's a win for the employer. They're getting more quality applicants.

And it's a win for us because we retained the client and they're spending more with us.

Martyn Redstone (28:55.58)

Love that. So, so we've gone from the risks, which is reporting data and also not knowing your own data, your own conversion rates, your own numbers, but also the benefits are you can, you can start targeting better. get better in depth analysis over exactly what's happening from a conversion perspective and types of candidates. So you can actually become quite a consultative partner to your clients as well.

I find that absolutely fascinating. I know we haven't got much time left in this. So I had a whole nother question around your relationship with universities and colleges and what have you. Because one of the things that we haven't discussed yet is, and you mentioned it very early on, which is that one of the reasons why you focused on this niche was because there was a lot going on for people coming into university, but not much happening to help.

Steven Rothberg (29:31.406)

Cool. I can keep it short.

Steven Rothberg (29:50.83)

Hmm.

Martyn Redstone (29:53.416)

graduates, seniors, find employment post university, college, you know, call it college over in the US as well. Over here in the UK, universities are, are league tabled, they're, targeted on number of graduates going into full-time employment post, you know, post-graduation. Is that the same in the US? And also, how do you, does that?

Steven Rothberg (29:57.73)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (30:10.318)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (30:15.288)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (30:18.957)

Yes.

Martyn Redstone (30:21.704)

Does that give you a lever to have a decent relationship with the educational establishments as well in terms of your supporting their own targets and their own metrics?

Steven Rothberg (30:35.01)

Yeah, so yes, the vast majority of colleges and universities in the US belong to an association called the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and they publish that data. The schools report what they call placement data, some of them. They're not actually placing, but how many of their students find a job within their chosen career path within six months of graduation. The US Department of Education

Martyn Redstone (30:52.212)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (31:03.694)

if it continues to exist requires the reporting of that data. So if you're choosing which school to go to, you can look at the data and you can say school A, I've got a 31 % chance of finding a job in my chosen career path. School B, a 93 % chance. Guess which one you're more likely to choose. So that kind of reporting is very, very helpful or could be.

because I don't think that very many 17, 18 year olds are paying attention to it. They're paying it. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (31:38.1)

No, but they get the, I was going to say they get that kind of wisdom from their parents, hopefully, that helped them make those decisions, hopefully. So how does college recruiter, yeah, exactly. So how does college recruiter engage with universities to say, and the colleges to say, hey, look, I can help you improve those metrics?

Steven Rothberg (31:44.12)

Hopefully. Yeah, if the parents know about it. Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (31:57.698)

Yeah, we don't very well. And it's definitely it's an area for growth. So we do not partner with individual colleges, university career sites. The publishers that drive traffic to us are mostly other job boards. We pay them on a per click or per application basis. Most of the schools either have homegrown systems, which I'm pretty sure the code was written by Stalin in 1952. Or they're using a system like Handshake.

Martyn Redstone (32:13.236)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (32:27.41)

or job teasers is big in the EU, systems like that. They don't tend to play well with others. We definitely have some university partnerships. One of the problems that a lot of the career service offices have on both sides of the pond is that they're sort of stuck in this belief that if the student didn't find a job through on-campus recruiting,

Martyn Redstone (32:30.387)

Mm-hmm.

Martyn Redstone (32:37.053)

Okay.

Steven Rothberg (32:53.816)

that it wasn't attributable to the school, to the Career Service Office. And I really wish that they would get over that. And some schools have. Some schools, it doesn't matter how you found that right job. What mattered is that you found that right job. And so whether they do it through a job board or through on-campus interviewing or their cousin next door, it doesn't matter. We gave you the education that helped you get into that field. And at the end of the day, all of us,

Martyn Redstone (33:21.588)

You made it. Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (33:22.274)

talent acquisition, job boards, anything. If we don't help people find the great, great new careers, we haven't done our jobs.

Martyn Redstone (33:31.228)

Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Great. So, final few minutes. we've gone over, you know, so much advice and so much, education, you know, thank you so much on, on all of the, insights that you've, you've provided around, around, know, the different kinds of pricing methodologies and all those kinds of things. what about advice that you would give to an aspiring, you know, job board builder, you know, somebody who's

Steven Rothberg (33:59.374)

Mmm.

Martyn Redstone (34:00.724)

really the early stage of their entrepreneurial journey, know, and they're building up, you know, what would you give kind of, you know, top three pieces of advice of somebody who's been doing this for 25 odd years?

Steven Rothberg (34:12.366)

Yeah, number one is there's always room for another great pizza shop. And what I mean by that, that came from a professor of mine in my undergraduate business program. What he meant was that you don't have to be first. And it's OK if there's another pizza shop that's doing a lot of business. If you have a really good product and you market it well, you can make a good living at it.

And there's plenty of room out there for other good job boards. Where I see job boards failing is that they aren't good, or sometimes their tech is really good and their marketing is really horrible. And so nobody knows about them or nobody can understand what it is that they do. So you really need both. hear a lot of mostly younger startups where they'll say, essentially we've built a better mousetrap.

Martyn Redstone (34:54.9)

Mm.

Steven Rothberg (35:09.794)

And maybe they'll raise a bunch of VC money. And then shockingly, two years later, nobody remembers they existed. And it's because they didn't really have a good market product market fit. Their potential customers weren't convinced to shift their spend. You've got to convince a lot of employers to stop spending as much on other vendors and shift that money to you. So you've got to offer them a.

And the fact that you exist or you have really great tech is not compelling to them because all they care about is hiring people. So you got to talk their language and you've got to be able to demonstrate that to them. Yeah.

Martyn Redstone (35:54.385)

It's the so what, as I always say, it's the, if you can't answer that, so what, you know, we've got great tech and an employer says, what, you know, if you can't answer that, then yeah, absolutely agree. Absolutely agree.

Steven Rothberg (36:02.914)

Yeah.

Yeah, the other piece of advice that that I would give and I'm going to steal this from my friend Jerry Crispin of career crossroads. One of the very nicest things that Jerry has ever said to me, and he said many, many nice things about many, many people, but this is really stuck with me is that he said until he met me, he had never met anybody in the job board space.

that understood talent acquisition. And I'm like, Jerry, what the hell are you talking about? And he's like, every other job board owner, leader that I've met is a technologist first. And they're focused on the product and they don't really understand the needs of their client. It's not about driving more applicants. It's not about your cost per click. It's not about your job search results page and how pretty it is.

Martyn Redstone (36:40.841)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (37:05.196)

It's like, do you help them accomplish their goals? And usually in talent acquisition, their goal is hire reasonably qualified people as cheaply and as quickly as possible. And all the rest of it, it's fun for you and me to talk about it. But at the end of the day, TAP folks, it's like you've got three seconds. Tell me why I should stop spending with a vendor that I'm okay with.

and instead give you a try.

Martyn Redstone (37:37.168)

So I suppose even if you are a technologist and you decide to start up a job board, make sure you understand your clients, basically. Make sure that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (37:44.856)

Yeah, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Is it, are you guessing at their problem or have you actually asked them? And if you've asked them, are you really listening? I see that too with a lot of business people where they will pretend that their customers have a problem because they know they can solve that problem. But you've really got to understand. Like if you go to an employer and you say, I've got a great solution for you.

and it's $250,000 a year and it's going to solve all your problems. And I've literally had this and the employer comes back and they say my entire recruitment advertising budget for the year is $25,000. You want me to spend 10 times that just on you? Go to hell. So you've really got to understand your client if you're going to be able to help them solve their problems.

Martyn Redstone (38:40.092)

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I see that far too many times as well, which is I've built something now I need to find a problem that it solves. and yeah, and that's exactly what is happening a lot recently. So I totally get that totally get that. Fantastic. Okay, so just to wrap up. What are the plans for 2025? What's what's going on with college recruiter this year?

Steven Rothberg (38:46.861)

Yeah.

Steven Rothberg (38:57.869)

Hehe.

Yeah, we have a couple of major initiatives. One of which I can kind of talk about the other, the other which I can't. Both of them are technology based. We're growing businesses up, revenues are up, profitability is up. And so that's encouraging. I see others in our industry that are kind of flat or down. Sometimes it's

Martyn Redstone (39:23.945)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Rothberg (39:29.6)

industry, sometimes it's the country, sometimes it's the job board. But for us, we're optimistic and that's leading us into two things. One is we need to do a much better job of managing the campaigns. Each employer or each customer tends to have one campaign, but sometimes we have customers with multiple. We need to do better job of automating a lot of that. We're doing too much manual work.

We have about 3 million jobs on our site at any given time, about a million new ones a day. It's not feasible for any human to look even at a campaign level at 10,000 or 100,000 jobs and be able to figure out which ones need help and what that help might be. We need automation for that. The other big piece that we're trying to get a lot better at on the technology side, sorry, Martin, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

Cool.

Martyn Redstone (40:30.536)

Please don't do that. You don't need to tell me it's fine. Look, know, Stephen, can I just say what a pleasure it's been to talk to you today. And thank you so much for sharing your insights, your experience, and your knowledge. I've really enjoyed the session today. I really enjoyed speaking with you. And to that end, yeah.

Thank you so much and wish you all the best for 2025 when you can tell me about your plans and don't have to kill me. I look forward to hearing all about it. Thank you very much.

Steven Rothberg (41:05.112)

Deal. Cheers, my friend.