What was the original idea for College Recruiter and what problems were we trying to solve?

College Recruiter’s chief executive officer, Faith Rothberg, was recently interviewed by a learning and development company. One of the questions they asked was about the history of our company, including what problems we were attempting to solve.

The company out of which College Recruiter grew was founded in November 1991. We were publishing maps and employment magazines for college campuses for the first few years.

In 1995, a couple of us were in a career service office at the University of Minnesota when the director said to us, “There’s this thing called the Internet”. She said that she didn’t know what it was but that some of her students were using it to research companies they were about to interview with. In those days, the best way to do that research was to go into the career service office and go through their collection of annual, corporate reports until you found the one for the company you were researching or, just as often, found that it was missing.

We paid a high school student who was working for us $3,000 to build the first version of our website. We launched in November 1996. Looking back, it was incredibly rudimentary but not at all uncommon for the era. Job seekers could either search by category or location, but not both. So you could run a search for engineering jobs or jobs in Illinois but not engineering jobs in Illinois.

The problem we were trying to solve was to try to find a way to help every student and recent graduate find a great career. It was — and remains — important to us that we didn’t just serve some students and hardly any recent graduates or just students from some schools. We wanted to be inclusive and not exclude students simply because they happened to attend the “wrong” school. Unfortunately, we still see that approach a lot amongst some of our indirect competitors.

We’re currently in the middle of launching the seventh version of our software. True to our desires way back in 1996, our site is built from the ground-up to be inclusive. About 2.5 million job seekers use our site a year and every one of them has full access to every part-time, seasonal, internship, and entry-level job advertised on our site as they search by their desired location and keywords. The keywords can be job title, major, military occupation code (MOC), and in just about any language.

So, if you grew up in Philadelphia, are attending a school in Los Angeles, and want to find a job in Houston, you’re going to able to do that on College Recruiter. It is very, very unlikely that your career service office website will have any jobs listed in Houston and, if it does, it will likely only be a very, very small number. At College Recruiter, we typically have about 750,000 jobs advertised on our site at any given time.