Perception Is Reality: Faith Rothberg of College Recruiter on Pricing, Positioning, and Three Decades Without Outside Investment

For three decades, Faith Rothberg has been involved in strategic development and technology, from managing business units with large corporations to consulting with large and small businesses and finally running her own business with her partner and husband, Steven Rothberg, at College Recruiter. She is known for her ability to envision long-term, strategic solutions, her skill in managing technology in the fast-paced world of the Internet, and her strong relationship skills, which allow her to manage people well. Her passion for helping young adults find great careers stems from a service mindset that Faith works to imbue in everything that College Recruiter does. In 2021, Faith was recognized by TATech, as one of the top 100 Most Influential Talent Acquisition Thought Leaders.

Two of your largest customers asked the same thing within a week: four times the candidates for four times the money. Take me inside that moment. What did you actually think when you heard it, and why didn't the obvious answer, just sell them a bigger package, work?

The company of which I'm the CEO, College Recruiter job search site, sells employment advertising to employers, most of them enterprise-level, who are hiring at scale. By revenue, the most popular package that we offered in 2014 was our "all you can eat" job posting package. The most expensive option cost $12,500 for the year.

Coincidentally, two of our customers came to us within about a week with essentially the same question: "If we paid you four times as much, could you deliver four times as many candidates to us?" When a customer is asking you how they can give you more of their money, you tend to find a way to make that happen.

At the time, I was a scholar in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, which requires each participant to come up with what they called a growth plan. Mine was born when I was walking on the shore of Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota. Instead of charging employers per posting or month, we would charge them for every candidate that we delivered to their website, or more if those candidates applied. That way, we aligned the revenues we would generate from the employers with the costs of delivering candidates to those employers: the more candidates we delivered, the higher our costs, but also the higher our revenues.

You moved from flat-fee posting packages to charging per click and per application. That is a fundamental change to how the business makes money. What were you most afraid would break, and what nearly did?

I wasn't afraid of moving from the traditional, duration-based posting packages to charge per click or application because we didn't do that. Instead of eliminating duration-based posting packages and replacing them with per-click or application packages, we took the lower-risk approach of offering all three.

In our industry, that's commonly referred to as a hybrid pricing model. It's somewhat rare because most of the new entrants do not offer duration-based pricing. Those who do sell primarily, or even exclusively, on a duration basis tend to be those that have been in existence for many years.

Initially, most of our customers remained on the duration-based pricing model. Gradually over several years, most shifted to the performance-based options. Today, only a couple out of hundreds prefer duration-based.

What did the shift cost you in the short term, in revenue (a range is fine), in customers who didn't want the new model, or in what you had to build before it could work?

The shift to the hybrid business model cost us nothing in terms of lost revenue, as all customers who preferred to continue to buy on a traditional, duration-based model could continue to do so, and 12 years later, a couple still do.

What it did cost was a lot of money to build the system that could handle the performance-based pricing models. We quickly discovered that we weren't just changing the pricing. We also needed to change the product and some of our people. Selling on a traditional, duration-based model is far simpler when it comes to the technology, so we needed to make massive upgrades to our product. The same applied to the people. Selling and delivering a performance-based product is far more complicated, so we needed people with strong critical-thinking and math skills.

We've invested millions of dollars in building what some describe as a day trading platform for job advertising. Every posting that we sell can have a different cost-per-click or- per-application, and we operate in all five major currencies: U.S. dollars, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, British pounds, and Euros. We have customers buying only per click in one country, and others buying per click in a dozen countries, per application in several others, and both in several more. And some of those customers buy in U.S. dollars for some countries and Euros in others. And then the same happens in reverse as we buy traffic the same way from an extensive network of other job boards and career-related sites.

The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program shaped how JobsThatScale came together. What did that guidance change about the decision that you wouldn't have arrived at on your own?

The faculty coached and, occasionally, pushed us to think big. They brought in scholars from all over the country operating a wide variety of businesses. One had a food truck and wanted to open a restaurant. Another had a brick-and-mortar store serving a local clientele and wanted to open an online store serving customers nationally.

What the program helped me and, therefore, College Recruiter envision and then execute was how to strategically grow our business while, at the same time, minimizing the risk in doing so. This was not a run fast and break things approach, nor was it approach decisions at the speed of molasses. We learned how to identify and embrace situations where the upside was huge and the downside minimal, both in terms of likelihood and severity.

Three decades in, no outside investment, helping millions find early-career jobs. What did betting on that repricing teach you that still guides how you make big calls now?

I've always been good at looking at a problem in a balanced way. I've taken some personality/skills-based tests, and they show that I'm one of those people who can work across areas that are outside my natural comfort zone much more than others. This gives me a good balance in how I work. Others might be extremely good with tasks that require creativity but terrible at tasks that require meticulous work. There are plenty of people who are better than me at math, for example, but I'm a lot better than the average person. Some others are better at writing, but I'm a lot better than average.

What the experience of adding the new pricing model taught me was to be more entrepreneurial, but not in a reckless way that so many entrepreneurs are. Instead, I'm less afraid to take risks, but I'm better than most at identifying which risks are worth taking.

In hindsight, I wish that we had made some different decisions. For example, the decision not to take outside investment was a mistake, as that's continually constrained our ability to execute. We've had to be scrappy and often move slower than we wished. On the other hand, the vast majority of venture capital-funded companies fail, and we're still relevant...after 35 years.