Category Archives: Student

We live in a more and more open world. Even with the current context, the diplomatic tensions or the protectionist politics, we still live in a multicultural context in which people still want to discover other lifestyles, other cultures, at any age and this earlier than before. Every year, thousands of students apply to go abroad, some of them for a short amount of time, or others forever. Whether it be with an exchange program, like Erasmus in Europe, or placement year or simply to gain a first experience in the professional environment, these expatriates don’t only want to discover a country like the common tourist. Sometimes, they want to understand an entire different culture, to discover other mentalities, but also being confronted with the bad sides of countries sometimes defined as a paradise, where everything is possible.
In this blog post, we will first see how colleges and big privet schools recruit their international students. Then we will see why these students with international experience are good first for universities but also for companies. And finally we will give you a kind of ranking of the countries that attract international students the most, and the best job boards to recruit students and international workers.

Recruitment of international students in higher education

Going abroad sometimes help you to stop taking things for granted. It allows you to detach yourself from your motherland and from the country that welcomes you. Of course it depends on the country you have decided to leave and the one that you will discover. Every school from every country of the world has different ways of recruiting you. In Europe, thanks to the Erasmus program, it has become easy to go abroad to study. Also, there are many programs of mobility for workers and for people that work for a company that has relocated its activity. But let’s go back to students and how schools decide to give them a chance to leave.

Many privet schools and public colleges have decided to make school years and internships abroad mandatory, for some degrees that have a very international orientation. It is made to counterbalance the disparities of language level. These schools often sign partnerships with foreign ones to exchange students. It allows these schools to differ from the others, and this will help the student to differ from the other candidates after, when he or she looks for a job.

The recruitment process is usually the same in all schools. You have some application letters to write, English test such as the TOEFL, TOEIC or other language tests, depending on the country. In some privet schools, you also have competitive exams, and an access to a network of schools or companies to get an internship. Now, colleges in general use social media marketing for the recruitment of international students. They send messages to attract international students and after the exchange year, they try to convert international students into kinds of brand ambassadors. And this has become quite efficient and successful.

Why are international students interesting for both universities and companies?

Going abroad for a year is a huge life experience. It is more than enriching for your personal and professional life. It allows the person to develop a remarkable adaptability, but also the capability to discuss, to exchange, to sell, to work with international people or teams, in a multicultural context. If you are to work in a multinational business, you will have the ability to be aware of one country’s traditions, therefore to adapt to the client.

This quotation from a French business school is a good summary of the purpose of hiring a former international student: “Opening to the international is capital for managers that will have to work in international environments, to open negotiations with foreign partners or to develop activities beyond their national border.”

Top 10 countries welcoming international students the most

1. United Kingdom
2. United States
3. Germany
4. Spain
5. China
6. Canada
7. Australia
8. Ireland
9. Netherlands
10. India

Jobboard Finder’s top Students and Graduates job boards:

• StudentJob International
• Internships (USA)
• Absolventa (Germany)
• Yjbys.com (China)
• L’Etudiant (France)
• Freshersworld (India)
• Student Job Search (New Zealand)

For both employers and job seekers, Jobboard Finder is the first decision-making tool for recruitment campaigns and job searches. By gathering tools and services that recruiters can use to search and compare employment websites from all over the world to find the best job search sites, it really is the best solution for recruitment needs. Today recruiters can also purchase job advertisements for the media they have selected and manage their postings directly from our unique platform. Then they can rate and review the job boards they have used in the past for our community of professionals to see.

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Last week, we had the pleasure of chatting to College Recruiter’s President and Founder, Steven Rothberg, about their place in the US market, the setbacks from the 2008 Great Recession and their future plans for expansion.

Can you tell us more about your job board and its current positioning in the international job board market?

College Recruiter believes that every student and recent graduate deserves a great career.

Our customers are primarily Fortune 1,000 companies and U.S. federal government agencies. At any given time, tens of thousands of employers are advertising about 300,000 internships and entry-level jobs on our job search site site. On an annual basis, our site is used by about three million students and recent graduates from all one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities in the U.S.

Due to requests from some of our larger customers, we recently enabled the posting and searching of jobs outside of the U.S. The number of those postings and job seekers reading and applying to them is a fairly small percentage of our overall traffic, but it is growing quickly and part of our long-term growth strategy.

What are the specific features that make your job board different from your competitors?

A key differentiator between College Recruiter and our direct competitors is that we’re really, really good at helping employers who need to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of students and recent graduates. Studies from eQuest and Appcast show that employers are fortunate to hire one candidate per job posting regardless of the type of job, employer, location, or job board. But with our new JobsThatScale product, we’re able to listen to the hiring needs of the employer, figure out how many candidates we need to send to their career site to satisfy their hiring need, and then deliver that traffic.

What can you say about the current traffic on your website? What countries are visiting more often?

On an annual basis, our site is used by about three million students and recent graduates from all one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities in the U.S.

How do you plan to develop your job board within the next few years? Any new projects?

Our primary growth opportunity is JobsThatScale, a solution that allows us to deliver to employers the number of candidates they need to fulfill their hiring goals whether they need dozens, hundreds, or thousands of new employees in one or multiple locations. Until now, employers with volume hiring needs have needed to buy candidate traffic from big, general, aggregators like Indeed, Jobs2careers, and others. Those sites typically perform quite well but are unable to deliver a highly targeted audience because they’re general rather than niche sites. With JobsThatScale, we can deliver the quantity of the aggregators but with the quality reserved to niche sites.

What are the main challenges you will be facing in the coming years?

We’ve survived and thrived through many challenging times since I founded this business in 1991 and launch of CollegeRecruiter.com in 1996. We’ve seen red hot labor markets and the 2008-09 Great Recession. We’ve seen direct competitors with lots of money but foolish business plans come and go, and we’ve seen direct competitors with no money but great business plans come and go. We’ve seen the dominance of Monster, Indeed, and LinkedIn. But through it all, we’ve adapted, grown, and improved. We’re well tuned into the external forces that shape our business, present us with opportunities, and create challenges. Yet moving forward I believe that our main challenges are internal: how do we best manage our growth?

We, at Jobboard Finder, are looking forward to seeing how College Recruiter develops over the coming years and we wish them the best of luck in all of their endeavours!