CollegeRecruiter.com channels Google

CollegeRecruiter.com find themselves in a hot spot. If you’ve read my previous post this evening about mtvU buying RankMyProfessors.com you’ll know that a lot of heavyweights, like mtv parent Viacom, see big dollars in the college market. That’s why niche sites that really know the college world like Facebook and CollegeRecruiter are positioned so well in the coming months and years. Need I remind you that with the coming baby-boomer exodus from the workplace that demand on our next generation of workers may top that of any we’ve seen to date? Hey wait a minute, I’m in the wrong business.

After clicking on the “Add to Google home Page” button on CollegeRecruiter’s home page you’ll see a confirmation page acknowledging that you’re about to swear off all rights to your second born, (it’s all Google-e-gook to me) and presto, as soon as you hit the almighty confirmation button you’re taken to your personalized Google start page. Here’s how it looks on my Google home page where I searched for ‘Dream Job’ in Florida in my favorite industry.

This kind of user personalization and web site functionality has been a strong point for Google in the past year. Not long ago Google rolled out the ability to create your own custom search engine, like the one we used to create Popula8ion.com, which indexes our world of recruiting, jobs, and recruitment marketing over hundreds of sites across the globe. Personalized search is fast, more relevant, and more valuable because you get what you want the first time. The power of CollegeRecruiter’s Add Google button is in its simplicity: it is so easy and fast for users and publishers to put into action. It took me about as long to add CollegeRecruiter.com’s job search engine to my Google page as it did once for John Belushi to yell ‘Toga!’ in Animal House.

I asked CollegeRecruiter.com President Steven Rothberg about his Google addition via e-mail and he had this to say about it:

“Julian, I’ve been reading about “mash-ups” for a while now, where one web service is combined with another and thought that there must be some good potential there for CollegeRecruiter.com. I’m a big believer in first picking the lowest of the low hanging fruit. As the vast majority of web users conduct at least some of their searches through Google and Google has made it so easy to create these gadgets, it seemed logical to me that the lowest fruit to be picked would be to add our most basic feature to Google by enabling our users to add our job search engine to the Google home page with two clicks of their mouse.

I do not expect that this gadget is going to cause our traffic to skyrocket, but I do expect it to cause our repeat traffic to increase noticeably and, more importantly, make our site even more friendly to the job seekers who we serve. It is this devotion to the candidate experience that helped us win the 2007 Weddle’s User’s Choice Award for best job boards.”

That makes as much sense to me as going to college to get ahead of the game.

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