Scaling a Million-User Career Platform - Fastlane Founders with Steven Rothberg - Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

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

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://gybwp.com/guest/steven-rothberg
https://wrkdefined.com/person/steven-rothberg
https://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, actually I don’t have to take people on in the US I can get somebody in the Philippines or in South America. And therefore the opportunities opened up for an international press bench.

Steven Rothberg [00:06:55]:
Yeah. In that way COVID helped us. But it was not COVID that drove that decision at all. Instead, what was happening was that our customers are primarily Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies. They hire and scale. They hire the vast majority of college and university students. And what was happening is that as technology was improving and becoming more expensive for these large organizations, they started to centralize. And I’m going back about 10 years ago is when we really started to see the shift. And so rather than an organization like one of the big four accounting and consulting companies, rather than, you know, they’re in know, 150 countries or whatever, rather than having 150 different recruiting departments and 150 different applicant tracking systems, the database that big employers use to manage applicants, they started to centralize.

Steven Rothberg [00:07:53]:
And so if that accounting and consulting’s head office was in New York, the recruiting team, the talent acquisition team globally would sit in New York and they would have one license for their ATS and they would run all their recruitment advertising out of New York. That presented us with a great opportunity because we were already doing business with them in the US and some of those customers, not most, but enough of them, were asking us questions like, hey, you’re helping us in the US and that’s great and we’re happy. Can you also help us in Canada, the UK, Australia, Belgium, etc. And until a few years ago, the answer was no. I mean, it’s kind of like they’re saying to us, help us give you more of our money. And we were telling them, go call our competitors. I mean, I’m exaggerating to an extent, but that’s kind of what it was. And so then we sounds like, you know, with the same platform, the same process, the same customers, we can expand pretty easily globally. And in some ways we were right.

Steven Rothberg [00:09:04]:
And in some ways we were wrong.

Jason Barnard [00:09:06]:
Right. So I got the reason for it wrong. But that internationalization you mentioned, lots of anglophone countries and then Belgium. Is that one of your problems? Language.

Steven Rothberg [00:09:18]:
Bingo. Yes. So you’re not as dumb as I look as they would say. So that is, that was exactly an issue. What we very quickly discovered that although the UK and the US are, you know, two countries separated by a common language, you start, the more you start to look at it, the more you see that certain phrases are very common in, say, London, that people in New York are baffled by, for example, employers in the UK that hire a lot of university graduates. First of all, they call it university. In the US they call it college.

Steven Rothberg [00:10:03]:
The other thing is, is that they would talk about schemes in the UK. If it’s, if you have as. If you as an employer have a hiring scheme, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a plan. In the US if you have a hiring scheme, probably you’re running a sleazy, multi market, multi level marketing organization.

Jason Barnard [00:10:27]:
I’m from the UK and yet you said a scheme. And I went, ooh, ooh, scam. There’s something going on here, more American than I thought.

Steven Rothberg [00:10:36]:
Well, and my apologies to you for that. So, some of just the words, some of the spelling, you know, as you knew, as you know, there are a number of words that are spelled differently. Labor has a u in the UK, not in the US. Honor, mobilize.

Steven Rothberg [00:10:55]:
We put a z at the end of it. Not only do you not call it a z, you would call it a zed, but you’re going to use an s. You know, there’s some things like that. But now if you start to go to The Netherlands and the language there might be Dutch or French, depending upon where you are, or German, if you’re in Switzerland, they’ve got four different languages. If you’re in China, the character set is different.

Jason Barnard [00:11:23]:
I gave up on China and Asia with the character set purely because storing it in a database was scary.

Steven Rothberg [00:11:30]:
Exactly.

Jason Barnard [00:11:31]:
You can’t actually read, whereas with a Latin language, I can actually more or less guess what’s being said. And I just figure when I’m developing it, when I’m looking at it, if I can even begin to decipher it, I’m in trouble very quickly.

Steven Rothberg [00:11:44]:
Right. And so the path and some of the problems that you’ve discovered are very much like what we have. You know, is, is there anything about China, including the language, that would be an absolute deal killer? No, we can never go in there. You know, I would say no, we absolutely may end up going into China and dealing with the character set. But it’s a heck of a lot easier to run ads in Amsterdam, where at least the character set is the same and a lot of the words are the same or that can be easily translated. And you can do that at scale, very inexpensively. As compared to China, it’s cheaper to go from New York to Los Angeles than it is to go from New York to London or London to Antwerp. But we, I think that we’ve at times done

Steven Rothberg [00:12:34]:
A bad job like any organization, we make our mistakes. But at times we’ve also, I think, did a pretty good job of evaluating the risk reward. What’s the risk? What’s the cost of going into Amsterdam instead of Johannesburg, which is also going to be an English. English language.

Jason Barnard [00:12:52]:
So, yeah, and you’ve got the localization in different anglophone countries that you’ve mentioned. Then you’ve got the language side when you move into Belgium, and in Belgium in particular, you’ve got the three different languages. In Switzerland, as you said, four different languages. And then the additional complications of different character sets and you’re ramping up the complexity. Did you roll it out one by one?

Steven Rothberg [00:13:14]:
Yeah. So it was primarily customer driven. What we found was that our customers, again mostly the Fortune 1000s. They kind of led us into the countries that they felt we could do the best job. And I don’t think that there was any talent acquisition, professional sitting in one of these big companies pondering how can we best help College Recruiter grow. They don’t care and they shouldn’t. Right. But what they do know is that they’ve got money to spend, they’ve got people they need to hire and they’ve had success with us in the US. So where is the risk reward best for them? And they’re going to say Canada is the most similar to the US so let’s start them there. And then if it works in Canada, let’s go over to the UK.

Steven Rothberg [00:14:05]:
And then once you get into the UK it’s like, okay, is that Europe, is it not? You know, now we get into the whole Brexit conversation. But the reality is, you know, couple dozen miles or you know, a few dozen kilometers away from the UK you’ve got other very big prosperous countries that are industrialized, France, Germany, et cetera. But the language and the culture and the way they handle their recruiting in France is far different than in the UK. The UK is much more like the US but it’s not the same as the US.

Jason Barnard [00:14:43]:
So let’s take France because I’m sitting in France here.

Steven Rothberg [00:14:47]:
Yeah.

Jason Barnard [00:14:47]:
Was the biggest barrier of a language or the culture and the rules and regulations?

Steven Rothberg [00:14:52]:
Yes and yes. So we both, so language was more of a technical issue. But fortunately the way that our site is built, as a candidate you can come to our site and enter a keyword search using French words to find a internship in a retail company. And our site will work, it translates it. We let, we license some technology from Google. They know a thing or two about translation and so that made it easier. Another issue with non-English language countries like France is culture. And again, it’s not that.

Steven Rothberg [00:15:37]:
What we found was there wasn’t like a talent acquisition person sitting in one of these big companies who said we don’t like the fact that people at College Recruiter might answer emails at 9pm and for us culturally that’s not okay. Right. It wasn’t that kind of culture. But what it was is in France they are more relationship driven than in the UK and the UK is more relationship driven than in the US. So they have to understand that we’re not just like an American company telling them in Paris how they should do their recruiting and that our model is right. And because they’re in France, they’re wrong. Right. You see American companies that are quite arrogant trying to scale, trying to go into France and other countries and it’s like, well, because it works this way in the U.S. therefore you, you’re a square peg.

Steven Rothberg [00:16:36]:
We’re a round hole. You need to become a round peg. No, you do. We, we, we definitely could see that we needed to adapt. We’re on a journey, we’re definitely not at that destination yet.

Jason Barnard [00:16:50]:
Right. Adapt and thrive is the point. And I think kind of people underestimate it because when you say all that’s going to internationally mean, you think, I’ll translate. And it’s much deeper, much, much deeper than that. And then making that decision to say, well, culturally, the UK is different, therefore we need the different spellings, but we also need a different approach. And I would imagine it’s not just translating, it’s adapting the text to speak to me as a British person sitting in Britain with a mindset and a process in terms of the employer and the expectations of the potential employee needs to be completely changed.

Jason Barnard [00:17:27]:
You needed to then employ somebody in the UK to say, this is how it works here.

Steven Rothberg [00:17:32]:
We do have an employee in the UK, but we don’t really leverage him that way. He’s one of our developers. So, Jason, when you were speaking, you know, a few minutes ago about, you know, COVID and, you know, I can’t remember exactly the words you use, but basically the world became more flat and you could hire somebody, you know, anywhere globally.

Jason Barnard [00:17:49]:
The world’s gone from flat to round to flat again. I like…

Steven Rothberg [00:17:53]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I don’t think we’re talking about being flat earthers, that’s the topic for another podcast. But the. What we did find is that we need to do a lot more education and our sales channels need to be different. So, for example, what we found was that it was easier for us to do business in the UK, in France, in Germany, through intermediaries. So rather than working directly with the employer, those employers almost always hire staffing companies or advertising agencies and they have expertise in buying media, not just in hiring people. And when they have expertise in buying media, it also meant that they could, like, look at our products and go back to the employer and in 10 seconds say, I recommend that you buy this campaign from College Recruiter and LinkedIn and Indeed.

Steven Rothberg [00:18:50]:
And the employer wouldn’t be getting into the, well, where is College Recruiter located? And I’m going to go to their website and I see English here. The intermediary took care of all of that for us, so we could invest more sales time with that intermediary and educate them. And they were already literally the experts in that industry for those French companies, and then they could kind of go back. And so we were able to essentially leverage the expertise and trust of those local players where, if we had to be the ones directly communicating with the end user, with the end customer, the employer. Then we would have to build that relationship over many years. This was a shortcut.

Jason Barnard [00:19:41]:
This has been, not the conversation, unexpected, but really interesting about internationalization moving across the globe. Just one last question then. What’s the next step? Or what problems do you see. Yeah, approaching. And as you said earlier on, you’re going to make mistakes, but I would imagine you’ve got a much better grip of the probability or the problem issues you’re going to have. So what’s the next step and what do you envisage?

Steven Rothberg [00:20:07]:
So we talk internally of, and we use the analogy of riding a wave. You know, if, if you’re out there on a surfboard and the water’s pretty calm, it’s kind of hard to go anywhere whether you’re good or not. But if you’re on a surfboard, even the worst surfer in the world is going to get pushed by that wave. And if you’re good, that, that could, that ride can be quite fun. So we’re pretty good at some of the things that we do. One of them is performance-based pricing. So traditionally in our industry, employers pay per post $200 for a 30 day ad. Whether you get anybody applying or not, whether you hire no one or whether you hire 10 people, still a couple hundred dollars.

Steven Rothberg [00:20:48]:
Where the US market shifted largely about 10 years ago, as Indeed became much more popular, was to what’s called pay-per-click. The candidate sees the ad on the job board, they click on the apply button, they go over usually to the employer site. Maybe they apply, maybe they don’t. But that click to the employer site, that’s what the employer pays for. It might be a dollar instead of $200. That pricing model is almost unknown in continental Europe, but it is taking hold in Canada. It is taking hold in the UK. So as these intermediaries, these ad agencies, they understand that we know how to do this pretty well as they’re going to their clients and saying, hey, we should shift some of your budget to pay-per-click.

Steven Rothberg [00:21:40]:
Okay, fair enough. Who are the vendors that do that? We’re now on a very short list. So what I see coming over the next year or two will be not so much from our doing, but just from the shift in the industry that more of our customers will be ready, willing and able to buy how we sell. So we’re a little too far ahead for a lot of companies in France and that was a mistake. But at the same time it was too early. It wasn’t wrong you know, it wasn’t like wrong in and of itself where we should trash it. We just have to be more patient than we initially thought we were going to be.

Jason Barnard [00:22:26]:
And that’s a really, really great point to end on is it isn’t because you’re not selling as much as you expected when people aren’t ready, it’s that they aren’t ready and you would do well to keep going which is what we’ve had at Kalicube with what we do is we’ve been too early and it’s now paying and we’ve had to wait for the world to catch up with us, which is the case that you’re now having. And I love that conversation. Totally unexpected. Absolutely brilliant, Steven. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for watching. You get the outro song as well. A quick goodbye to end this show.

Jason Barnard [00:23:04]:
Thank you, Steven.

Jason Barnard [00:23:06]:
Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.