Landing your first job is easily the most stressful – and difficult – part of anyone’s college career. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to it, and it can be a confusing time for college students. While there are various tools such as LinkedIn that help college students get their name out, there has yet to be a career site or social network focused solely on helping students and new college graduates start their careers. This is where collegefeed comes in.
Collegefeed’s mission is to make it dead simple for students and early grads to kickstart their careers. When I was in college the biggest challenge was getting my name and qualifications in front of potential employers. There was the formal on-campus interviewing process but beyond that you need to get creative with a combination of networking. I was lucky enough to land a job through the on-campus interview process, but most students and grads aren’t so lucky. One thing that excites me about the product that collegefeed has created is that it creates one more opportunity for college students and recent grads to get in touch with employers.
How does it work?
The first step is to sign up for an account so that you can create your profile. You can do this either through email or through connecting your Facebook account.
The simple sign-up process takes only a minute or two. I was happy to see this, because young adults are extremely pressed for time. I don’t know about you, but it seems like every time you sign up for some new social network, website, etc. it’s just one more thing to sap your time.
Once you pick a username and school, there are only a few quick steps left. This includes choosing three companies you are interested in, three areas you are interested in (i.e. Finance, Marketing, etc.), and finally importing your resume. Instead of importing your resume, you can simply connect your LinkedIn.
Great Features
As soon as your profile is set up you have access to some great features:
Unique URL for your profile – I really like that you get a unique and relatively clean URL that links directly to your collegefeed profile. Adding it to your email signature, as they suggest, can help get some eyeballs on your profile that otherwise might never see it.
Job Listings – I love that job listings are given prime real estate in the dashboard. After all, the goal here is to land a job, right?
There are two job sections. At the top is featured jobs.
Below that is a section filtered by companies you follow or your interest areas.
Interview Notes – The last feature I want to highlight is interview notes. I first clicked on this section and wasn’t sure if it was for positions that companies were currently in the process of interviewing for or what the purpose was. Then I clicked on ‘Expand to Read More’ and found out that they are actually interview ‘reviews’ in a sense that people who went through an interview with a given company for a given position gives information about that interview. This is invaluable information for college students, new grads, or really anyone that is early in their career.
I remember going through the interview process myself and I would search Google for interview questions. Next thing I know I’m preparing answers for 100+ questions, researching the company, and God knows what else to prepare for the interview. If I had the ability to go into a database like this and read about experiences people had interviewing for the same company and possibly even the exact same position I would already be leagues ahead of the competition.
Below is an example of an interview note that someone left about a job they interviewed for with Dreamworks:
As an additional incentive for people to leave interview notes about their own experience, collegefeed is giving away a $25 eBay gift card to the top 100 interview notes that are submitted:
Yes, there are a lot of start-ups and perhaps you are weary of getting on board with collegefeed because you are unsure of whether they will be around in a year or two. I think the below quote from a recent article from iamwire will alleviate those fears:
Till date, Collegefeed has registered students from more than 1200 universities including some of the established ones such as Stanford, UC Berkeley and Santa Clara University. With the help of Collegefeed platform, students have already made connections, secured interviews, jobs, internships and financial awards with over 100+ companies like Google, Cisco, YouTube, eBay, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Saavn, Adroll and many more.
If you’re a college student, a new grad, or looking to go back to school for another undergrad or advanced degree, I would recommend checking out collegefeed. Worst case scenario you spent some time giving yourself another opportunity to get your name in front of employers. Best case scenario it lands you a job at your dream company.
If collegefeed doesn’t fit where you are at in your career, please consider passing this review along to any college students or new grads that you know. I’m sure they will appreciate it.
UPDATE: It was just announced on 10/3 that collegefeed is now open worldwide. See more details on Reuters.
What are your thoughts on collegefeed? Will you make use of it or would you have made use of it when you were in college?
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Full Disclosure: I was compensated for this review, but the opinions are my own.
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Pretty cool idea, especially the interview notes. It will be interesting to see how much more or less useful this is than other job search engines out there. Maybe the most powerful feature is that it’s focused on college students (or is it? How did you sign up?). That would at least let applicants work in a smaller pool than the bigger sites.
Matt @ Mom and Dad Money It absolutely is targeted towards college students. Additionally new grads are a demographic that they are targeting, as their mission is to help college students and new grads kickstart their career.
That sounds like a pretty cool idea. It actually sounds like a bit more expanded version of Glassdoor which I used quite a bit when I was in the corporate world. Those interview notes can be invaluable if the people leave good notes/reviews.
FrugalRulesI also use Glassdoor, and it definitely would be a good supplemental site. The interview notes are the best feature, in my opinion, because not knowing what to expect when you interview is the worst part of it all.
That’s pretty cool. Never heard of it but it sounds like a great tool for future college students and those who want to go back to school.
Holly at ClubThriftyIt’s a relatively new site and definitely is a great resource for those who are in school.
I have never heard of it either but it sounds like a great resource for college students. Especially the interview notes. It’d be so nice to know what to expect so that you can prepare for the interview. Very cool.
SingleMomIncomeInterviewing is not one of my favorite things in the world and it’s definitely not one of my strengths, so I think the interview notes provide so much value.
I never heard of this site but I’ll definitely be checking it out. It sounds like it could be very useful.
Wannabe U of M student I see?! ;) Just have to give you a hard time.
Ca$hFunny Haha well I’m considering going there for my MBA.
Anything that can help new grads I’m all for…unless they are competing with me for jobs. :)
Beachbudget Haha great point!
Nice review, looks like a powerful tool to connect grads to careers. Boy, do I wish they had something like this 15 years ago when I graduated. Kids today don’t know how lucky they got it. Wow, I am starting to sound like my Dad!
KyleJames1 I agree with you on that one. I can’t even imagine life before personal computers. Today there are so many resources at your fingertips.
It sounds interesting, I’ll definitely check it out.
ayoungpro Great, let me know what you think if you do check it out.
I do recruiting for my company and we had to change our interview process as too many students were cracking it. We ended up getting too many bad employees. Students have resources like this to help them prepare. Looks like a good site.
Might have to add this to my job search!
That is awesome the amount of information that you can get. I know glassdoor is another place where you can look at interview reviews for a company. You can also get salary data for various positions (provided people have submitted data for it). It is a very useful tool for those going into a job interview.
Wow brilliant idea David! I know many will benefit about this one.
This is my first time to read about collegefeed. I know this is a big help to all American or international students who are trying to get job in United States.
That seems like a pretty neat idea. I wish this was around when I was graduating!
This is genius and very useful indeed!