Experience.com Inc

College recruiting has always been a separate challenge. Itís complicated by the fact that youíre forced to deal with multiple campus career centers, each with its own slightly different set of rules and deadlines. It can also be a daunting task remembering which schools produce the best candidates in the fields you are hiring from.Since the mid-nineties, employers have enjoyed the assistance of Internet based college networks like JobTrak (now MonsterTrak) in the U.S. and Campus WorkLink (now part of Workopolis) in Canada. While these solutions donít fully replace the campus career fair or on campus interviewing, they certainly make it easier to post jobs to multiple institutions and manage incoming applicants.What many recruiters may not be aware of, is the difficulty in building and maintaining a strong network of campus career centers.

Career centers, especially during recessions, are often reluctant to share their employment listings with students outside their own institutions. Philosophical differences as to whether employers should pay fees to post jobs, and whether certain types of jobs should be allowed, add to the difficultly in finding a compromise that everyone can live with inside a network.The main challenge for campus recruiting networks has been to hold partnerships between hundreds of campuses together in a cooperative that is greater than the sum of its parts. This usually involves maintaining boards and committees to represent the career centers and designing backend systems that give them some control over their own students and grads and an ability to enforce their particular set of rules.Why does any of this matter to recruiters? Because in some ways, colleges are insular, protected places. A campus recruitment effort can be made easier and more productive with the assistance of the career center.

Networks like MonsterTrak, Campus WorkLink and Experience Inc. work to provide a portion of this relationship electronically. The result is usually cutting edge free or heavily subsidized software for the career center, an opportunity for the career center to enjoy additional revenue streams, and easier access to students for employers resulting in more advertised job opportunities for students and recent graduates.Experience Inc. is a two year old company that claims to offer the largest campus recruiting network in the U.S. With about 650 campus partners and 70% of the countryís ìtopî schools, they may be the biggest by at least one very important measure ñ a meaningful partnership with campus career centers.

Experienceís main competition, MonsterTrak, boasts over 1200 schools in its network, but according to Experience, it has only about 140 full partnership schools ñ that is, schools that use their solution internally to the exclusion of other systems.This is only important to a recruiter if Experienceís ìfull partnerî network amounts to better results on job postings and easier management of campus recruiting programs. It boils down to whether you believe the campus career center still has a major role to play in the job searches of their students and recent graduates. In the age of the Internet, where students can search any number of job boards (and so are not reliant on postings offered by their career center) how much influence over the choices and perceptions of their students do career centers have? To some degree, this varies from school to school, but surveys show that the average student will never set foot in a career center or overtly seek its assistance in any way. Still, an active campus career center makes its influence known outside its office walls via professors, the registrar, during career fairs and otherwise.

There is little doubt that an effective career center can be a useful ally in your campus recruitment efforts About Experience.com Inc. Experience built their network as a service to campus career centers who use it to manage their relationships with students and employers. Experience played no direct role with employers. As of December 3rd this year and after recently closing a $16.5 million dollar round of financing, Experience is adding an employer module for large companies with campus recruitment programs. They call it College Recruiting Relationship Management (CRRM) with access to a private network of over 2.5 million potential candidates.The new module gives employer clients password protected access to the network to post jobs and add screening criteria (append questions to the postings), receive candidates, assign and track their status, append notes and share thoughts about candidates with others in the company. It also helps you to locate schools that produce graduates in the fields youíre looking for.Experience.com Inc. has a unique business model.

Like its competitors, it offers campus career centers use of sophisticated, web-based software to help them manage their operations and track the progress of their students who are seeking employment. Partner colleges market the system on campus and provide all incoming freshmen with passwords to their accounts where they can upload their resume(s), search for and apply for jobs and access career information.So, depending on the efforts of any particular college, according to Experience Inc.

CEO, Jennifer Floren, you can expect between 30-60% of its students to be accessible to you on resume searches and a subset of that to be exposed to your job postings. A network without internal affiliations on campus wouldnít likely garner that level of coverage. Unlike its competitors, Experience Inc. is aiming its efforts toward employers at the middle to high end of the spectrum. Instead of charging for use of the network on a transactional basis, Experience offers an annual subscription based model that gives its employer clients unlimited access to and use of the network. The package also includes an analysis of the clientsí current campus recruiting procedures. Brad Singer, Executive V.P. Marketing and Business Development for Experience Inc, says they are usually able to reduce overall campus recruiting expenses by 20-40% for their clients.

The Experience subscription lets you post your positions in unlimited quantity to as many schools as you wish in the 650 college network. You can also use system tools to search for and target groups of students/alumni from various disciplines either for job postings, email messages or to invite them to functions, interviews, etc. There is also a module that lets you schedule interviews with candidates on-line. The network provides employers with contacts within college career centers for special requests and for help in determining a strategy for any particular school. Using their administrative modules, campus career centers may be able to share demographic information with you, including forecasted supplies of graduates across different disciplines up to four or more years into the future. This type of information about local economies may not exist elsewhere and could be useful to you for strategic planning purposes and in deciding where to locate new offices.Students and alumni use Experience.com to manage their job search efforts.

They gain password protected access to a custom page where they can store resumes and determine what access rights employers will have to their resume and personal information. One unique focus of Experience is its efforts to keep candidates using the site throughout their careers. Rather than referring students to other on-line job search tools or to the parent site (as with Monster Trak) post graduation, Experience wants to keep them in the network. If this works out, your recruitment dollar might go a little further as youíll be able to use the network to source candidates for mid level and senior positions in addition to entry level jobs. The Vitals:Target Customer: Experience Inc. has chosen a model that targets middle to large size companies with significant campus recruitment programs. Smaller employers who may only recruit one or two graduates per year, can phone their individual campus career centers directly and be charged whatever the career center may charge on a per posting basis.The subscription model offered by Experience Inc. coupled with their analysis of your current practices and ongoing efforts to improve your process, is of potential interest to organizations that want to improve efficiencies and potentially save money. So far, Experience has ìabout two dozenî clients for its new employer solution, they include Prudential Financial, Citadel Insurance and other large companies.Implementation: Experience Inc.ís services are web based so there is no software to install. If a client requires or requests on-site training, Experience will provide it but the computer based orientation tools they provide are usually sufficient. Analysis of your current practices, including consultations and adjustments usually takes several days.Price: Employersí annual subscription fees range between $25,000 and $200,000 depending on how wide their recruiting efforts are and how much money Experience believes it can save for them.

Campus career centers also pay but their fees are considerably less at $3,000-$5,000 per year.Customer Service: Experience utilizes account managers for employer and career center clients. Toll free numbers are also supplied for troubleshooting and advice in using the tools.HRCOMments:Experience is going about building a college network the right way ñ through solid partnerships with campus career centers. By supplying schools with the software and hardware necessary to modernize their operations, Experience is gaining meaningful commitments from a (usually still) important player in campus recruiting. When a school adopts the Experience solution, it uses it exclusively. The career centersí interests merge with Experienceís ñ both want to maximize the number of registered students/alumni and the number of job postings. Year after year, if the career center markets it properly, student/alumni participation increases and the network becomes more valuable to all concerned. As it becomes more attractive to recruiters, more jobs are advertised which causes more student interest ñ a virtuous cycle in other words.Of course all of this depends on students being more interested in Experience than other job boards. Most of the large boards, like Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder, have thousands of entry level jobs advertised as do local boards affiliated with newspapers. If Experience and their campus career center partners cannot get the majority of their studentsí ìmindshareî when it comes to job searching, Experience will have a very hard time justifying their fees.

Experience claims to base its fees at least in part, on the success you can expect to have with their solution. They claim to be able to lower your campus recruiting costs by 20%-40%. This being the case, you should be able to negotiate payment contingent to some degree on your success with the network.Contact Information:Experience.com, Inc. One Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston, MA 02109800.489.7611



Author
Allan Schweyer
aschweyer@hr.com
www.hr.com

Allan Schweyer has been involved in Internet recruiting since 1994 when he pioneered e-recruitment solutions for Human Resources Development Canada. From 1995 to 1999, Allan directed the award-winning National Graduate Register, Campus WorkLink and SkillNet.ca programs with Industry Canada, which introduced the concepts of applicant tracking and advanced screening to job boards and ìcareer networksî to job seekers. In 1999, Allan formed the On-line Recruitersí Association of Canada. In 2000 and 2001, he worked with Cahners Business Information in Boston to build information portals for technical professionals and attended graduate school at Harvard University. Allan currently consults with large organizations on HR strategies and specializes in e-recruitment projects. He is a senior researcher and analyst with HR.com and the guest editor of the HR.com staffing vertical.