Steven Rothberg talks with Jason Barnard about scaling a million-user career platform.

Steven Rothberg is the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of College Recruiter. He believes that every student and recent graduate deserves to have access to meaningful employment opportunities through efficient, cost-effective recruitment solutions that bridge talented graduates with leading employers.

Steven Rothberg shares insights from scaling a job search platform across international markets. He discusses the challenges and opportunities of expanding from North America into Europe, including navigating language barriers, cultural differences, and evolving recruitment pricing models while serving Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies.

Discover how his platform evolved from serving hundreds of thousands of US students to reaching millions internationally. Learn practical insights about overcoming localization challenges while maintaining service quality. Get ready for an eye-opening discussion about the complexities of scaling a recruitment platform across international markets. This episode delivers practical insights challenging common assumptions about global growth.

What you’ll learn from Steven Rothberg

00:00 Steven Rothberg and Jason Barnard

01:21 Steven Rothberg’s Brand SERP

02:45 What Happens When Google Sees Entities With Identical Names?

04:14 What is College Recruiter job search site?

04:22 What Two Types of Clients Does College Recruiter Serve?

04:38 Where Do the Million Users of College Recruiter Come From?

05:28 When Was College Recruiter Built?

06:04 How Did College Recruiter Transform From a US-Focused Job Board Into a Global Recruitment Platform?

09:26 How Did the Language Barrier Affect College Recruiter’s Global Expansion?

13:18 How Does College Recruiter Evaluate Market Readiness When Expanding Internationally?

15:03 How Do Multilingual Job Platforms Break Language Barriers in Global Recruitment?

15:38 How Do Cultural Differences Shape Business Relationships Across Global Markets?

16:09 How Can US Companies Adapt Recruitment Practices for Success in Foreign Markets?

18:02 How Does College Recruiter Navigate Cultural Nuances?

20:34 What is One of College Recruiter’s Area of Specialization?

20:36 How Do Traditional Job Boards Structure Their Pricing?

20:58 How Do Companies Implement Pay-Per-Click?

21:47 How Will the Shift to Pay-Per-Click Models Influence Recruitment Strategies Globally?

22:04 How Can Companies Balance Market Timing When Introducing Innovative Business Models?

22:29 How Can Businesses Maintain Momentum When Their Innovations Outpace Market Readiness?

This episode was recorded live on video December 24th 2024

https://youtube.com/live/0-npL98nL54

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://gybwp.com/guest/steven-rothberghttps://wrkdefined.com/person/steven-rothberghttps://moneyinc.com/steven-rothberg-shares-the-secret-to-collegerecruiter-coms-business-longevity/Steven Rothberg

Transcript from Scaling a Million-User Career Platform - Fastlane Founders with Steven Rothberg

Jason Barnard [00:00:02]:Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy. A legacy we're proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

Jason Barnard [00:00:31]:Hi everybody, and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I'm here with Steven Rothberg. Welcome Steven.

Steven Rothberg [00:00:37]:Hey, Jason. It is awesome to be with you today.

Jason Barnard [00:00:40]:A quick hello and we're good to go. Welcome to the show. Steven Rothberg.

Steven Rothberg [00:00:48]:I'm not going to sing because I suspect that many of the viewers would prefer to keep their lunch internal than external.

Jason Barnard [00:00:57]:Brilliant. And today we're talking about scaling a platform. And you have a platform, you scaled it. And I'm really intrigued by the idea of having one single application and the advantages and disadvantages of trying to scale it. A, fast or b, huge. And I've had experiences too, so I'm really interested to hear yours. But before we do that, a quick look into your personal brand on Google.

Jason Barnard [00:01:23]:This is what we focused on on Google. And I found it interesting that your J your middle name, came up J for John. And Google understands you only with the J in the middle. And when it has the J in the middle, it understands you to be an author. Generally speaking, that means you've written a book, but I don't see a book there. What happened?

Steven Rothberg [00:01:43]:I was an editor of some publications. Perhaps it's getting it from that. I almost never used my middle name or middle initial J. J is like you said, is for John. There are three Steven Rothberg's in the entire world, as far as I've been able to tell. One, the one's an attorney in New Jersey, one's a guy in Australia and in me. I think the last time I checked was maybe a year ago. So if I had a name like John Smith, I think I'd be much more interested in having that T or whatever for my middle name.

Jason Barnard [00:02:18]:Right. Well, a couple of things occurred to me there. Number one is I didn't realize your name was so specific and unique. So the J is absolutely not nested. And yet Google's picked up on it and yet you never use it. And that's a really good sign for me that Google's a little bit confused. The other thing is that the LinkedIn profile on that Knowledge Panel, if we look here is the guy you just mentioned who's a lawyer and you're a lawyer too.

Jason Barnard [00:02:42]:So there's a potential mix up there. And what I think people don't realize is how easy it is for Google to get mixed up because names are ambiguous.

Steven Rothberg [00:02:51]:Yeah. And even a highly unusual name. Right. If my name is easy to mix up and somebody else's name is, you know, Steven, you know, Christianson, that there's just the opportunity there. And yeah, I mean, I've seen that for years with like credit reporting agencies. Right. It's like, oh, you know, you've got this like terrible score. It's like, why do I have a terrible score? And then you start to look at that, some of the information they have about you and it turns out it's not about you, it's about somebody else.

Jason Barnard [00:03:20]:That's a really good point. And that's at a scale of millions managed by humans. And here we're talking at a scale of billions managed by a machine that no human can actually change information in. So the problem we have had with credit rating and credit scores is now taken over the Google, multiplied by hundreds of thousands and uncontrollable. Unless of course you work with Kalicube, which is my plug. We can control this for anybody who needs our help. And you can download the guide for free here with the URL kalicube.com/guides but we're not talking about that today. We're talking about your platform.

Jason Barnard [00:03:54]:College Recruiters and million users. A, where did they come from? And B, what do you do with them? And C, how many are you going to have in a year's time?

Steven Rothberg [00:04:06]:Great question. So it might be helpful for your listeners to sort of have a very basic understanding of what we do. So College Recruiter is a job search site. So think Indeed, ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn. We are in a double sided marketplace. So some of our customers are the ones that write the checks to us or actually electronically pay us. And those are the employers that pay to advertise their job openings with us.

Steven Rothberg [00:04:32]:The other customer group does not pay us money, but they are the million users and those are the job seekers. For us, our niche are students, recent graduates and others who are early in their careers. So zero to five years of experience. So we get virtually none of that first group coming to our site. Coming to College Recruiter at any point during the month, they may spend tens of thousands of dollars with us a month. We may deliver hundreds of thousands of candidates to them and they never come to our site. The employers. It's a little bit like having a really good mayor.

Steven Rothberg [00:05:11]:If you don't know the name of your mayor, that's a really good sign. If you're not having to go to a job search site as an employer and it's just working for you, that's a really good sign. The candidate side, these are. I founded the company way back in 1991, so 33 years ago now.

Jason Barnard [00:05:32]:Wow.

Steven Rothberg [00:05:33]:For most of our existence until a few years ago, we were almost entirely focused on the US and a little bit Canada. I grew up in Canada, so that kind of influenced us there. And we were doing pretty well. We would have hundreds of thousands of mostly American college and university students and recent grads come to our site, look for internships, look for jobs upon graduation, that kind of thing. And then a few years ago, we kind of reached this fork in the road. Do we continue to focus on North America? And it's going to become increasingly difficult to get more and more and more candidates to our site. The more candidates we get, the more we can deliver to employers, the more employers will pay us. Or do we do take a more international strategy so that we can scale up? And that's what we did.

Jason Barnard [00:06:33]:Right. And so that brings me, you said a few years ago, are we talking about COVID when everything went international, primarily because everything became remote by definition, and all of a sudden companies woke up and said, well,