KARLA PORTER

When you visit CollegeRecruiter.com it’s kind of hard to leave, espe­cially if you are a Recruiter and inter­ested in recent col­lege grad­u­ates and interns. The con­tent is dynamic, ency­clo­pe­dic and well archived. I first con­nected with Steven Roth­berg, Pres­i­dent and Founder of the com­pany, through Face­book.  My work locally with col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in work­force devel­op­ment really sparked my inter­est in the site and in Steven’s work.

Career paths can be amaz­ing jour­neys and I wanted to know how a law school grad­u­ate ends up with the dream of hav­ing the the pre­mier infor­ma­tion source for col­lege stu­dents, grads and recent grad­u­ates who are seek­ing employ­ment, con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion and busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties. He gra­ciously agreed to an interview..

SR: I was a law clerk for a year with a trial court and had been hired for an appel­late court clerk­ship the sec­ond year but I decided to accel­er­ate my plans by going into busi­ness a lot sooner than five to seven years after grad­u­a­tion. I had fig­ured that I’d prac­tice law for the expe­ri­ence and then either start my own busi­ness or join some­one else’s but I didn’t like what the prac­tice of law was doing to some of my friends and I was a lot more excited about the world of busi­ness than the world of law so I let the appel­late court judge know that I wasn’t going to show up, he hired a replace­ment, and I started my busi­ness part-time while I was com­plet­ing my trial court clerkship.

I won­dered what type of intern­ship expe­ri­ence he had in col­lege and what he thought of it look­ing back.

SR: I had a num­ber of career-related posi­tions but vir­tu­ally no one had “intern­ships.” It just wasn’t a term that was used that much back in the 1980’s. One of the best jobs that I had was after my sopho­more year when I spent four months work­ing as a highly paid temp in Lon­don. It was my job to help a national retailer that had vir­tu­ally no com­put­ers fig­ure out how to com­put­er­ize its man­age­ment com­pen­sa­tion review sys­tem. They wanted to for­mal­ize the process to make it more fair and fig­ured that it was the log­i­cal time to com­put­er­ize that por­tion of their busi­ness so I cre­ated a Lotus 1–2-3 data­base with loads of easy-to-use macros so their sec­re­taries could keep it up-to-date and I trained them on how to do that.

Work­ing so closely with insti­tu­tions of higher edu­ca­tion that are con­cerned about place­ment for their stu­dents, I asked Steven his thoughts on how the aver­age career ser­vices office on cam­pus meets the needs of stu­dents seek­ing mean­ing­ful internships.

SR: Unfor­tu­nately, the aver­age career ser­vices office does not come close to meet­ing the needs of the vast major­ity of its stu­dents because the vast major­ity of stu­dents never give the office a chance. Nation­wide, only about 15 per­cent of stu­dents even step foot into their career ser­vice office and I’ve heard esti­mates that fewer than five per­cent actu­ally find intern­ships or jobs upon grad­u­a­tion through their career ser­vice office. The prob­lem is much more with the stu­dents than the offices as the offices tend to be staffed with ded­i­cated, well trained, and pro­fes­sional peo­ple but they’re fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle in try­ing to lead that horse to water and make it drink.

Liv­ing and breath­ing the tran­si­tion from col­lege to career, I wanted Steven’s opin­ion of what they could do better.

SR: I would like to see career ser­vice offices return to becom­ing place­ment offices. If they don’t, I sus­pect that within a decade many col­leges will out­source that func­tion to out­place­ment agen­cies like Lee Hecht Har­ri­son. It will be cheaper and I think that the stu­dents will be more likely to use a ser­vice like that in part because their par­ents will rec­og­nize the value better.

From law school to career devel­op­ment and tran­si­tion, there had to be a path that led Steven to collegerecruiter.com. It turns out that his entre­pre­neur­ial spirit devel­oped early on, as a student.

SR: I cre­ated a small busi­ness in col­lege that pub­lished a map for my school. I gen­er­ated the rev­enues through the sale of adver­tis­ing around the bor­ders. I then res­ur­rected that busi­ness after grad­u­at­ing from law school. To diver­sify rev­enues, I added an employ­ment mag­a­zine in four major mar­kets across the coun­try in 1995 and then the Inter­net came along so we added a web site in 1996. That grad­u­ally took over the busi­ness so by 2000 we had stopped pub­lish­ing the maps and magazines.

After 14 years in the busi­ness, 9 of them exclu­sively inter­net based, I was curi­ous to know the impact CollegeRecruiter.com has on col­lege stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates from Steven’s perspective.

SR: CollegeRecruiter.com is one of the valu­able tools avail­able to col­lege stu­dents search­ing for intern­ships and recent grad­u­ates search­ing for entry-level jobs and other career oppor­tu­ni­ties. We help hun­dreds of thou­sands of stu­dents and grads each month bet­ter pre­pare them­selves for the job hunt­ing process and their careers as well as help match them up with lead­ing employers.

Finally, I really wanted to know the vision for the future of the com­pany and its prod­uct. Could the lead­ing job board for col­lege stu­dents hunt­ing for intern­ships and recent grad­u­ates look­ing for entry level jobs and other career oppor­tu­ni­ties con­tinue to inno­vate and evolve?

SR: I would like to see CollegeRecruiter.com be widely rec­og­nized by those in col­lege recruit­ing as the dom­i­nant col­lege job board and I believe that we will get there within a few years because we focus on the needs and wants of our can­di­date and employer users AND we’re con­tin­u­ally adding and improv­ing the tools we make avail­able to both groups. Most job boards are stuck in this rut of sell­ing job post­ings and resume search­ing and very lit­tle else. We sell job post­ings but it is far from our biggest prod­uct by rev­enue and we stopped sell­ing resume search­ing 1.5 years ago to pro­tect the can­di­dates using our site from iden­tity theft and other such issues.

Just for fun I wanted to see how Steven would craft his career into a Twit­ter resume… just for the heck of it.

SR: Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, the lead­ing job board for col­lege stu­dents and recent grads.

Many thanks to Steven for shar­ing his inter­est­ing career path and vision for the future.