Breaking the Marketing Mold: Steven Rothberg of ‘College Recruiter’ On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Perhaps the biggest challenge that employers face when transitioning away from traditional and toward new marketing strategies is a lack of expertise. It isn’t that the employers are stupid but, instead, merely inexperienced. They’re going to make mistakes. A way of overcoming that is to bring in talent with that experience. Some employers will hire vendors or contractors to bring in that experience, while others will hire new employees with similar experience.
Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement? I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Rothberg.
Steven is the founder of the job search site College Recruiter, which believes that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career…and that it should be easy and inexpensive for employers to hire them. Each year, College Recruiter connects more than 12 million students, recent graduates, and other candidates who are early in their careers with employers who are hiring part-time, seasonal, internship, apprenticeship, and other entry-level job opportunities located just about anywhere globally.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?
I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. After high school, I enrolled in the undergraduate business program at the University of Manitoba. At the time, it didn’t recognize double majors or even minors, but I took enough marketing classes that many other schools would have considered me to have graduated with a double major in finance and marketing. One of my favorite classes was Small Business Marketing, which I took in the fall of my fourth year and which sparked the creation of the business out of which College Recruiter grew.
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
The company that I founded, College Recruiter, sells recruitment advertising products to mostly Fortune 1,000 companies, government agencies, and other employers that hire at scale. So, the marketing that I’m most familiar with is recruitment marketing. The biggest shift is that the largest buyers of recruitment marketing — mostly talent acquisition leaders who work for large employers — used to use data to justify their decisions but years ago shifted toward using data to drive their decisions. That’s been welcome news for College Recruiter, as almost all of our customers advertise their jobs with us on a performance basis, which is inherently data-driven.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
I don’t believe that it is essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing. Much of it, perhaps most of it, is still valid. Just because something newer has come along does not mean that it is better. Much of traditional marketing has stood the test of time, and will continue to do so. That said, just because something has long been used does not mean that it is better than something which is brand new.
For example, a decade ago we started to move away from the standard, duration-based pricing used by recruitment marketers since the dawn of recruitment marketing and shifted to cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-application (CPA) based pricing. By doing so, we allowed our employer customers to shift some of their risk to us, where I believed and still believe that it better belongs. We should be rewarded for what is largely within our control and not with what is largely outside of our control. It is largely within our control how many candidates see a job posting ad, click the apply button to go to the application page (we get paid per click for that), or even to complete the application (we get paid per application for that).
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
In 2014, when virtually all job search sites sold postings on a traditional, duration-basis, two of our largest customers were buying what was then our most expensive job posting package: an all-you-can-eat package for $12,500 per year. They asked if we could send them four times as many candidates if they paid us four times as much money. For one, we created a CPC package. For the other, a CPA package. Both were happy with the results and so we took the minimally viable products that we built and automated a lot of it. That allowed us to then offer the same products to all of our customers. We called that product JobsThatScale.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
The change from traditional, duration- to performance-based pricing allowed us to rapidly scale up in terms of the number of job postings we ran and for the number of employers who bought from us while, at the same time, rapidly scale up the number of candidates who used our site to help them find new jobs.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
When we started to charge per click or application, most of our customers assessed the value we delivered based on very subjective metrics, such as their guess for how many candidates we delivered to them. Over time, they started to track better and most now evaluate the effectiveness of their job board vendors based on the effective cost per application (eCPA). If they spend $10,000 with job board A and receive 100 applications, that’s an eCPA of $10. If the eCPA we generate is below that, we will be favored by the customer.
Can you share an example of something you tried that didn’t deliver expected results or ended up becoming a financial burden, and what you learned from that experience?
It is often difficult to predict how popular any particular job posting ad might be and employers. If ads could be inactivated instantly upon reaching a pre-set budget, that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. But, the standard in our industry is that customers pay for all clicks and applications generated within the previous 24 hours even if the budget has been exhausted. Occasionally, that’s meant that we delivered far more clicks or applications to our customers than they desired. Sometimes, the employers are fine with that. Other times, they aren’t fine with what they view as spending beyond their budget and so we’ll need to work out some kind of settlement with them. Sometimes that means that we don’t get paid for the excess clicks or applications.
Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?
- Influencer marketing campaigns. These are increasingly popular with consumer marketers, but are rarely used by those marketing employment opportunities.
- Gamification and contests. I occasionally see employers offering internships and other employment opportunities to candidates who enter a contest of some kind. Think “The Apprentice”, but with real candidates seeking real jobs and being faced with real challenges to differentiate them.
- Dark social recruiting. Lots of recruiters use social media sites like LinkedIn to reach out to candidates, but few use social and quasi-social services such as WhatsApp, Discord, and Slack.
- Reverse job fairs. At typical job fairs, candidates line up and almost beg employers for the opportunity to interview with them. At reverse job fairs, it is the candidates who are behind the desks and have the power.
- Employer brand ambassadors. These are common on college and university campuses where consumer marketers employ students to market their products, services, and employment opportunities to other students. A small number of employers do the same but for their internship opportunities.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
Perhaps the biggest challenge that employers face when transitioning away from traditional and toward new marketing strategies is a lack of expertise. It isn’t that the employers are stupid but, instead, merely inexperienced. They’re going to make mistakes. A way of overcoming that is to bring in talent with that experience. Some employers will hire vendors or contractors to bring in that experience, while others will hire new employees with similar experience.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
At the campaign level, we usually measure the success of our customers based on the effective cost per application, with the lower being the better. For our company, our primary measure of success is gross profit: how much revenue do we generate from the campaigns and what are our costs of goods sold to deliver that?
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
Evolution is a better description than revolution. I do not believe that we’re on the verge of any revolution but, instead, continued evolution. Technology will allow recruitment marketers to get better at scalable personalization. What information an employer delivers to one candidate should differ from that it delivers to another, even if they’re both the target audience for the same role.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
Adapt or perish, but that doesn’t mean abandoning everything that works overnight and replacing it with untried and unproven tactics or strategies. Instead, look for opportunities to try new methods that have low risks if they fail and high returns if they succeed. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
We are a month or two away from completing a technology project that will allow us to manage the job posting campaigns at a job instead of campaign level. At any given time, we might have hundreds of customers advertising millions of job ads. It simply isn’t feasible for people to look at every job ad ever let alone per day to determine if we’re driving candidate traffic to them profitably. But AI can do that and ours will.
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
Go to www.CollegeRecruiter.com for more information about College Recruiter or contact me on LinkedIn at www.LinkedIn.com/in/StevenRothberg .
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur and Thought Leader with over 25 years of business experience. He has founded, operated, and exited multiple companies and now builds into a handful of high impact CEOs. Chad has launched multiple online communities, including a recent leadership development platform, and also serves as a strategic advisor for Authority Magazine’s thought-leader incubator program. To learn more and connect with Chad visit: chadsilverstein.io
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Steven Rothberg of ‘College Recruiter’ On 5 Innovative & Non Traditiona was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.