This is classic chicken and egg problem. As a Startup who wants to post a job ad, I've no idea if you have enough students who are looking for job on your site, and is it worth paying $100/post. If you're starting now, then keep the job posting free or very minimal, so that you'll have more jobs posted. Once you reach students mass, then you can charge more to startups.
Well, with the amount of email I get I suspect either my school sells my email address or companies get people to just download the entire directory. There's at least 4 companies that I get regular email from and I've never interacted with them before. Maybe they plan on mass emailing students about this new service.
While it sounds like I'm being critical of this service, I would have liked to see this before I graduated. I know a few people who joined startups but it's because they knew someone who knew about the startup to even apply. My school has an entire building for technology startups but there's no listing of who's hiring, or at least if there is one it's not very well known.
Welcome to the recruiting space, try not to go crazy :) To get your service started, using email as the main messaging medium is smart as you want to build up your candidate-base, so offering something (in this case, information and job leads) will help you win adopters. Charging on a per job posting basis is a difficult sell as there are literally thousands of others offering very similar services. Showing job-seeker numbers can help motivate the employer to go with you as can past success stories. I'd recommend focusing on achieving those before you start charging. Think about offerings above and beyond just job postings, those are a commodity.
I've been running CollegeJobConnect for the past year and be happy to chat with a fellow entrepreneur who is trying to make student recruiting better. This is a really, really difficult space to be a startup in, so as much as we can all help each other the closer we will be to bringing improvement.
PricePoint is key in any service.
We started a similar service for The London Silicon Roundabout called TechStartupJobs and started at about £5 (about $8) to test market within our community of 1000+ tech individuals and companies.
Once you prove value price can be adjusted.
Didnt mean to preach but this is 101 Pricing Services that we mentor to our Startups (http://www.techstarthub.com/startup-mentoring/)
Best of luck anyway!
Great idea! Maybe I missed it, but how many people do you have subscribed to begin with? Perhaps that number isn't as high now, but that would be valuable information to display if it was something high enough to attract startups and sponsors.
For the same reason facebook's "college students only" rule when it first launched wasn't ageism.
It's a hook, catering to a very specific niche of ppl. If it catches on, you can bet that they'll expand with MBA2Startup and others, for more 'seasoned' vets.
Not buying it. If there was a facebook rule for "college students only", it was because facebook was for college students.
I have no doubt that many companies and headhunters look for recent graduates not because they have just been taught the finer points of development, but because they are most likely young.
If this website was slightly less veiled it would be called 20sToStartup.com, and you wouldn't even dare call that acceptable niche marketing. Maybe that's ok for cars and music, but not for peoples livelihoods.
It's cool, but I wish there was a way to separate what jobs you want mail for. (different types of programming, marketing, seo, product management, there is a lot of variety.)
Similarly, it would be nice to let students specify whether they are graduate/undergraduate, and maybe their field of study/interest.
I can imagine if I was paying to send an offer out to find people to solve hard CS or math problems for me, I'd be disappointed to find that 90% of the recipients were (for example) undergrad marketing majors.
When applicants receive the jobs in their inbox, when they click on the job to apply...they are asked a number of questions including being grad/undergrad, if they have github profile (for those applying for engineering jobs) and many more.
But we do have a great mix of backgrounds..about 30% marketing and the rest are engineering and design.