How much does it cost to post a job to Handshake?

Handshake is a career service office management platform that operates in a triple-sided marketplace. Its customers are college and university students, career service offices, and employers. The vast majority of its customers are in the United States, although Handshake is trying to expand into the United Kingdom and elsewhere internationally.

Handshake’s business model is similar to College Recruiter and that of most job boards and recruitment marketplaces in that candidates use the site for free unless they choose to buy optional services such as resume writing. Only a small percentage of candidates buy those additional services.

Unlike College Recruiter and most job boards, Handshake charges a fee to the career service offices. That fee ranges from $1,000 to more than $20,000, depending on the number of students enrolled at the school. Dozens of organizations provide career service office management software including Symplicity, JobTeaser, Gradleaders, Madgex, Graduway, and 12twenty. Some operate in only one market while others across international borders.

Similar to College Recruiter and most job boards, Handshake generates the bulk of its revenues from employers. Employers can manually post a job for free, but posting a job to Handshake does not mean that candidates will see it. Each school reviews and approves the job ads that employers want to put in front of the school’s candidates. As you might imagine, some schools are better staffed than others and some schools are more inclined than others to allow certain kinds of jobs or employers to connect with the students on-campus. So, if employers can post a job to Handshake for free, where do the bulk of its revenues come from?

The vast majority of college students are hired by a relatively small number of employers. These employers tend to be enterprise-level, meaning Fortune 1,000 companies, government agencies, and other employers who are hiring at scale. They tend to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands a year. Some of these employers are customers of Handshake and purchase Premium packages such as branding pages, analytics, and the ability to send messages to candidates who are registered with Handshake to tell them about a job that might be of interest to the candidate. This messaging is somewhat similar to the inMail product offered by LinkedIn.

Posting a single job manually to Handshake is free, but enterprise-level employers typically pay annual fees ranging from $10,000 to $250,000. Those fees come with no guarantees of success. The results delivered by Handshake may be great, mediocre, or awful. The risk is on the employer, as was typical in the job board industry until recently when more and more job boards, including College Recruiter, adopted a performance-based approach.

Under a performance-based pricing model, employers pay only when the job board delivers candidates. One example of this is cost-per-click (CPC), under which the employer might pay something like $0.50 or $1.00 every time a candidate sees the employer’s ad on the job board and then clicks the job board’s Apply button to go to the employer’s application page. Some of those candidates will apply and some won’t. Studies across all employers, all jobs, and all job boards indicate that about five to 10 percent of these clicks convert into applications, so even if the click costs the employer $1.00, the effective cost per application (eCPA) should be no more than about $20. Employers paying $250,000 to Handshake will want to see 12,500 applications just to break even with this eCPA.

Another pricing model that is less commonly used but rapidly growing in popularity is cost-per-application (CPA) and a similar but slightly different model is cost-per-quality-application (CPQA). Under these models, the employer only pays the job board when candidates apply to the employer’s job, and sometimes only when the employer has reviewed the application and moved the candidate forward in the hiring process such as by offering to interview them. The cost of these applications vary widely depending on the kind of job, geographic location, number of desired applications, etc but are often in the $35 to $50 range.

Many of College Recruiter’s employer customers are also customers of Handshake. Most post some of their jobs manually to Handshake for free and the feedback we get from them is that they typically receive what they paid for, meaning few to no applications. The employers who seem to be the happiest with Handshake are usually the ones who are spending the most money, meaning $100,000 to $250,000 a year with all of the risk of poor performance being on the employer.

At College Recruiter, the vast majority of our employer customers are on our standard agreement. They typically start off at $5,000 per month instead of $250,000 or more per year like some Handshake customers. Our agreements are almost all performance-based such as CPC or CPA and so we only make money when we deliver good results for our customers. At College Recruiter, we believe that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career…and that it should be easy and inexpensive to hire them.