How College Recruiter compares to Handshake

We get asked all the time how College Recruiter compares with Handshake, often because employers assume they need to choose between using one or the other service.  That might be true if we did the same thing, but we really don’t.  Let me explain. 

College Recruiter and Handshake are both leaders in helping employers engage, recruit, and hire students and recent graduates with up to five years of experience.  Handshake’s employer customers are primarily focused on reaching currently enrolled students of four-year, American, colleges and universities who are searching for internships. College Recruiter’s mission is far broader: 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.

That means that we help employers reach not just currently enrolled students but also those who graduated within the past five years. We help employers reach not just American candidates but those just about anywhere in the world. We help employers reach candidates not just from four-year colleges and universities but any post-secondary school including certification programs, bootcamps, trade and vocational schools, two-year colleges, and more. And we help employers hiring not just for internships but also part-time, seasonal, apprenticeship, first and second jobs after graduation, and other early-career opportunities.

Handshake has a platform that colleges and universities use to get employers’ jobs in front of their current students.  Automated job posting options, like scraping of the employer’s career site are limited, and students are required to use their .edu email addresses to access the job opportunities. If an employer has the bandwidth to manually log in and then manually post and manage jobs in another platform – Handshake is a good option to reach on-campus students with internships and other such opportunities.  

College Recruiter has built a programmatic solution that automatically scrapes (permission-based) just the jobs that our employer, staffing company, and other customers want us to run from their career sites or, if they prefer, through an automated daily (or even hourly for some customers) import of a feed of their jobs. Our solution then proactively gets the right opportunities in front of the right candidates at the right time through our global network of more than 120 job sites and 200 colleges and university sites via career center partnerships.  The network is critical in reaching the best-matching candidates (total reach of 20 million) because, according to Appcast’s research, candidates use an average of 11 different sources to find jobs.  The college career center is just one of those sources. College Recruiter’s product is how employers hiring at scale engage candidates in all the different places they are searching for jobs.  

Many colleges and universities discontinue .edu email addresses within the first year of students graduating.  That limits the level of candidates employers can engage through Handshake as they require that candidates use .edu email addresses to log in and then apply for jobs. College Recruiter has no limitations on candidates using specific emails to search for and apply to jobs, which allows for greater reach to job seekers post-graduation with up to 5 years of experience. 

The two platforms also differ in contractual periods required by employers.  Handshake’s agreements are typically annual. College Recruiter embraces a performance-based approach: if we perform well, our customers are happy to continue to buy our recruitment advertising products month after month and often in larger volumes. And if we don’t perform well, they should be able to find a vendor that better aligns with their needs. Our month-to-month approach allows employers to scale service up or down very quickly. Our standard agreement allows our customers to cancel with only five business days’ notice.

Similarly, Handshake’s minimum commitment is typically tens of thousands and even into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. College Recruiter wants to make sure that its customers are happy with the results we deliver and so our minimum commitment is only $5,000.  If you aren’t in need of service every month or aren’t happy with your applicant results, why continue paying for the service? 

Speaking of cost, another key difference between Handshake and College Recruiter is that their pricing is based on the product you buy and for how many months you commit to using them. If your results are good, bad, or ugly, you pay the same amount. With College Recruiter, almost all of our customers prefer to shift the risk of poor performance to us and we’re happy to take on that risk as we’re confident that we’re going to deliver results that are good to great. Instead of paying $X for Y months as customers of Handshake do, our customers overwhelmingly pay $X for every Y candidates that we deliver to their ATS or even $X for every Z candidates who apply to their jobs. If “our” candidates aren’t interested in your jobs, you won’t get applications and therefore won’t hire anyone, but at least you won’t have to tell your boss that $X from your limited budget was wasted. Conversely, if we deliver the candidates you want both in terms of quantity and quality, the money you spend will be a great investment and you may even decide to spend more.

Finally, College Recruiter operates internationally as it helps employers hiring in markets outside the US, including Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Australia. We started to accept postings outside of North America about 13 months ago and, already, that’s about 1/3 of our business. We’re multinational, multilingual, and multicurrency: we have customers advertising jobs all over the world in a bunch of different languages and we invoice and receive payments in every major currency. Handshake has some presence in the UK but, for all intents and purposes, is for US-based jobs only. 

Many enterprises use both Handshake and College Recruiter simultaneously.  If you have to choose one, it should depend on if you are looking for automation that scales up or down with hiring plans, flexibility in payment terms, if you prefer to pay for the duration of a service versus the performance or application outcome, and if you have international hiring needs or not. 

College Recruiter vs. Handshake Product Comparison