Building an Empire in HigherEd Hiring:
The Journey of HigherEdJobs

Introduction:

If you're building a job board or thinking about launching one, there’s no better teacher than Andrew Hibel. In this in-depth interview, Andrew sits down with Martyn Redstone to share how he and his two co-founders transformed a simple idea into one of the largest academic job boards in the world—HigherEdJobs. Serving over 3,500 colleges and universities and reaching 1.5 million unique visitors each month, HigherEdJobs is a masterclass in resilience, adaptability, and industry insight.

Watch the Full Interview:

5 Actionable Takeaways for Job Board Builders

Accidental Entrepreneurs Can Still Build Empires

Andrew and his co-founders never intended to launch a business. What began as a small project quickly grew into a powerful platform that serves thousands of institutions. Sometimes, the best ventures start with solving your own problem.

Pivot Your Business Model When the Market Demands It

Originally, HigherEdJobs operated on a free model, sustained by advertising. It wasn’t until demand grew from universities wanting more customized listings that they shifted to a subscription-based model, which became the foundation of their business.

Deep Industry Knowledge Is Your Competitive Edge

Understanding the hiring process in academia gave Andrew's team the ability to meet specific institutional needs better than generic platforms could. This focus on domain expertise allowed them to grow steadily and maintain trust.

Invest in Technology Early, Even If It’s Painful

One of Andrew’s reflections was the need to prioritize technology investment much earlier in their journey. They now recognize themselves as not just a job board, but a technology company that serves the education sector.

Stay Connected with Your Community

HigherEdJobs consistently attends academic conferences and remains active in industry associations. This connection keeps them in tune with their customers and ahead of industry shifts.

Full Transcript

Martyn Redstone (00:01.484)
Andrew, thanks for joining me today.

Andrew Hibel (00:03.41)
Thanks Martin for having me. It's wonderful to be here.

Martyn Redstone (00:07.104)
An absolute pleasure, an absolute pleasure. So let's jump into it. Could you give me a brief overview of your professional background and what led you to start your organization, your job board?

Andrew Hibel (00:21.702)
Well, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't add that it's not just my background, but my two equal and willing co-conspirators in this endeavor, John Eikenberry and Eric Lesmer. And the three of us all came in together back in 1996. All three of us have operated it since 1996 and are still involved today. We were in our 20s, we're in our 50s now. And it's been...

the three of us kind of doing it together. And I think that one of the important things to note is all three of us have very different backgrounds. Eric had a technology background and the technology side of the business. John actually has a PhD in higher education and John's on the sales and marketing side. My personal origin story comes from, I was a

I was intended to be a tax attorney working with colleges and universities helping charitable gifts come into the institution. All three of us met kind of in that sort of area. were all working at an institution. We were working on the advancement, development, or fundraising, depending on who you are and where you are, side of things. And we decided in 1996 that what we'd like to do, we'd all look for jobs. We all found the process to be

quite cumbersome and difficult at the time and positions not available in academia all that easily. And having a lot of spare time because we were young and boring, found that we found, well, maybe we should consider doing something like this. And that's how we started with no real intention of starting a job board and doing this for the next, quitting their jobs and doing this for the next nearly three decades of our lives.

We kind of refer ourselves as not necessarily intentional entrepreneurs, but accidental ones.

Martyn Redstone (02:25.006)
That sense. That makes sense. And why fantastic and varied background by a founding team. And I suppose it's testament to the team that 29 years later, all three of you are still working together, still running higher ed jobs and hopefully still getting along.

Andrew Hibel (02:40.049)
We have definitely taken not the rock band, we all can't play together except in a studio or live. The part we enjoyed most about each other is being able to actually take a break from the day to day and actually reconnect our friendships, which are deep and real and a very shared experience at this point. The two of them are located in Pennsylvania, I'm located in Chicago.

that the times that we actually get to be physically together are limited. So when we get that time, really treasure it.

Martyn Redstone (03:16.27)
That's fantastic. Fantastic. Well, there's a lesson there as well, especially if you're a part of a team of founders that you should absolutely cherish that face to face time, especially in a world where we're running virtually for most things. So I love that. Absolutely love that. So going back to that time when the three of you decided to create higher ed jobs and launch it, was there a point where you decided to go all in? Were you still?

You're you're working on something else first while you were building. And how did you know it was time to really take it seriously and go all in?

Andrew Hibel (03:55.89)
Uh, that first that last part of the answer first, and it's probably the easiest of it, which is basically our customers told us when it was time. When we first started, we were very intentional about working in 1996. That was prevalent at colleges and universities. We knew that people had it at their best and we were able to use it and were. Just like us and the name of the weather at that point. So.

We also knew academia, like I mentioned, John's a PhD, I actually have master's in higher education myself. And we kind of knew how colleges and universities organized around their posting system, their HR requirements, the difference between the academic side, the professor side, and the administrative side. And we kind of knew at that point how to kind of connect. And we actually initially thought, our first model,

which will sound absolutely insane right now is we didn't charge anything. We thought we would be free to central posting offices and then we tried to monetize through advertising. And we did that for quite some time. After a while, we realized two things. One, that was not a sustainable model. Advertising was a very, very tough sell, particularly as we were working on our development careers.

Martyn Redstone (05:02.574)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hibel (05:22.019)
And then the second part we realized is there were so many parts of the institution who weren't centralized who wanted to post a job. And that was actually our first paid product was because we wanted to actually accommodate those customers. So we'd actually start charging them money, much to kind of a principled thought that we'd be a free source. At that point, as the business were the number of

uh, institutions using the unlimited subscription increased. Eventually in 1999, that's when we kind of flipped from being a free source on the subscription side to literally converting a good number of those customers from being free customers to paid customers. At that point, we knew at this time that we needed to do this for quite some time. I'd also say mentally for myself, I would ask John and Eric if they were here to answer for themselves.

I kind of did it, I went into it kind of like I went into the pandemic. I thought, no, we'll do this for a while. The tech boom is happening. If you want to be a little bit reminiscent, the tech bust had not happened. And then we'd go back into the careers that we had chosen. Cause I think I really liked what I was doing back at the time. It was a great career choice for me. And I had worked hard in my career. I did not realize and I was not at all remotely thinking this would be something.

Martyn Redstone (06:22.786)
Mm.

Andrew Hibel (06:48.625)
back in 1990, but I will be doing 2025.

Martyn Redstone (06:53.496)
So originally, just a bit of a distraction from your career.

Andrew Hibel (06:58.897)
or so I treat myself.

Martyn Redstone (07:01.934)
Fantastic. So 26 years ago, maybe 23 years ago when you first kind of really started monetizing it, where have you got to? What does it look like now in terms of the customers you serve, the metrics, the numbers? Be interesting to kind of find out the before and after.

Andrew Hibel (07:23.889)
That is, that's pretty interesting. I actually asked a marketing team prior to this to kind of try to bring it up to speed because over the years, I think sometimes my statistics get dated in my head. What I can say is we're about a million and a half unique visitors a month. We almost work, I would say 80 % more directly with the schools posting the position.

And we worked with about 3500 colleges and universities last year, which is a very large percentage of those institutions. I believe 1200 to 1300 of those are using our unlimited subscription. Those are pretty much kind of the top-line KPIs for us. The subscriptions are in many instances tied with

their fiscal year. A lot of universities have a July 1st fiscal year. So we're actually entering heavy into right now, the new year season for those July 1, new year olds, which is pretty much pretty common at this point. Academic recruiting for new faculty usually starts around January 1st. We start seeing the end of the first quarter beginning the second quarter, it transitions into subscription new year season.

Most institutions want new faculty on campus prior to the fall and it's really kind of heavily weighted and that would probably go to another part. We go 60-40. A lot of people ask about how much faculty versus administrative. We flip 60-40. It's academic recruiting season. Usually it might bring up to 60 % of positions on our site are academic and 40 % are administrative. And then when that season's over, it can actually reverse itself.

particularly throughout the summer. It's pretty quiet in the summer on the epidemic side.

Martyn Redstone (09:25.632)
Yeah, I can imagine. But then, like you said, you you need to make sure that they're on campus prior to the start of the academic year. Yeah, so so fantastic, really fascinating and incredible numbers. You should be really, really proud of the the business and the job that you've you've grown over the last quarter of a decade, a quarter of a century even, sorry. But just wondering, you know, obviously it started with the three of you. When did you start growing the team?

What does the team look like now? When did you start investing in more people? And what kinds of people, what kinds of roles were you bringing on?

Andrew Hibel (10:03.953)
That's a fantastic question. First of all, thank you. But also, I think we're extremely grateful to our teammates because they've been fantastic. We're really great. We have wonderful customers. I know here in the US, colleges and universities, as far as reputation, are taking quite a beating. And I think in so many instances, I get the source of where the

Martyn Redstone (10:25.806)
Mm.

Andrew Hibel (10:31.537)
consternation of A.S. school colleges and universities, I can tell you, spend time on campus. And you will say, in most instances, not all. There are wonderful places that foster learning, foster the development of young minds and people in a way that is caring, safe, instructive. There is a lot of value in a four-year degree. There's a lot of value in a two-year degree. And if you really want to spend more time,

book a graduate degree. And if you're having questions about affordability, there's all these different options nowadays. If you want to get a four-year degree, in most instances, there is a pathway for you. It might not be your preferred pathway, but there's a pathway for you to reach it. So I just want to make sure we extend our gratitude to the industry that we serve. It's been an honor quite much. I think when we look at our extended team,

We really looked kind of being in fundraisers, we understood that for every front line fundraiser who brings in gifts, you have to administer those gifts. You have to steward those gifts. have to make sure your books are in order, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we have a good sense, think, particularly nowadays, but we had it at the very beginning, as we add things on the outreach side, we would be putting things on the back.

backside of it, whether it be technology, whether it be administrative positions, and a lot of our duties are pretty localized as far as our teams go. We have very specific roles for most people and we understand how those roles work. We have staff of about 40. We have probably our largest staff is our status and marketing team. Our technology team is fairly large as well. And then we kind of have

different types of back office positions where they'd be more operational or more supportive of the sales marketing and technology side. Because many ways as you knew, a good job board, and I'd love being able to say that here because I think we're proud to be a job board. A good job board is very much a technology company, not solely, a very much a technology company. And the number of data feeds that come into...

Martyn Redstone (12:50.03)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hibel (12:56.429)
us from colleges and universities, as I'm sure with lots of your guests, have increased dramatically throughout the years. And so much of our skill is making sure that we're servicing our customers when it comes to that, which is a hybrid of kind of both the technology side and the sales side, working with customers to get those in. And I would say both teams are excellent at that.

Martyn Redstone (13:22.498)
Fantastic, fantastic. yeah, it's incredible to have 40 people there and working with you is really, really impressive. Really impressive. I want to go back to something you were just talking about, which was the industry you serve. And one of the things that really shines through for me is just how passionate you are about the industry you serve as well. So I have a couple of thoughts on that, a couple of questions. And the first one, I suppose, is

How do you keep up with the industry? Such a huge industry of higher education. You talked about some of the numbers earlier. But also, as you also alluded to, huge changes that have happened in the industry as well over the years and also very recently. How do you keep up with the industry? How do you maintain your knowledge? How do you keep abreast of everything? And also, how do you maintain your reputation in the industry as well?

Andrew Hibel (14:20.209)
Well, think once again, I'm going to take the last question first. Maintaining your reputation, I think the first part is to worry about your reputation in some ways is something we do not do. We try to be service oriented. We try to treat our customers right. And we try to do all the things we're supposed to be doing right. If we do those things, we believe our reputation will speak to those things. And I think the more we worry,

first and foremost about the reputation, the harder it is to do the small things right that help create a reputation. So we just try to focus on those things. And I think that that's, that helped, I think as far as maintaining it, that's what helps it. We're known for the things that we try to do well and that helps. The industry, wow. In some ways we don't have a choice, but we have to understand the industry.

The industry is constantly presenting the challenges to us on a very regular basis. We get lots of great feedback from our customer partners about what's going on, what they need. We also have great data as far as all these decades about posting trends and what people are doing and understanding what's actually going on. We also, I mean, this sounds

kind of a little bit rough and I don't think I've ever spoken about this publicly. We can probably tell over 30 years if you're having financial issues, we can probably see what's going on and definitely if I can be liberal in saying this, a post COVID world, a world where we have COVID, we can definitely see how financially COVID disrupted a lot in academia, particularly in the US, but even more worldwide.

Beyond that, I think we've also leaned into the places where we can find our customers. As a company, we do a great number of academic conferences where we get to actually see our customers face to face and get feedback from them, as well as the associations, several of which we're very involved with, as far as those different associations that serve within academia. Because if you really think about academia, we're not really serving an industry, we're serving a venue with a bunch of little industries here.

Andrew Hibel (16:44.849)
So you could actually have a job board about the trades and there's an overlap with what happens with physical plant. mean, so much of the university is the maintenance of the physical buildings. We could very much overlap with having to have some knowledge in that particular area about how universities manage that. So it is really varied. I will say in my personal case, I'm naturally inclined to be curious and I'm somewhat of a junkie on information.

So it comes naturally to me. It doesn't really feel like work. just kind of like feels like I'm a former Chicago White Sox baseball fan. For those who may be listening from the US, they set the record for being the worst team ever last year. And it almost feels like a much more positive way of following the White Sox and seeing what's going on. comes, I think, more naturally to me than it may come to others.

Martyn Redstone (17:27.822)
No.

Andrew Hibel (17:43.352)
It's something that I seek out, I want to know, I want to understand, and if I'm not understanding, I look for more.

Martyn Redstone (17:51.022)
Excellent. Well, that's just absolutely brilliant. and it's as I said, you know, your passion for the industry really kind of shines through. But I think that's fascinating that when you think about, like you said, you know, a college campus and the fact that some of those roles are absolutely going to overlap into other people's industries, because like you said, you've got facilities management and you've got catering and you've got so many other things that are going on in the running of a college or university. So I think those are.

Really, really valid points, really valid points. OK, so one of the questions I like to ask my guests, and everybody tends to get used to this now, is if you could go back, if you could go back to the beginning 26 years ago, is there anything that you would do different? And if so, what would you do different?

Andrew Hibel (18:40.945)
I'm actually going to answer it with a little bit of maybe another question you might be answering. I think we look at the places where we've had issues and we try to be instructive about what those challenges were and try to address them. Hard stop. That said, dwelling on those is not a place we live on ideal basis. The road ahead of us

is you would think after this amount of time, we would say, well, you've seen everything. Nowhere near have we seen everything. Whenever you start thinking you've seen everything, that's when the most unexpected things happen. So I don't think we spend a lot of time now. If I'm going to say one thing, I'm really not pondering it too much, that definitely.

I don't think we addressed as strongly as we should initially in the 05 to 07 range about how much we needed to be a technology company. I think, and this is, I can tell you each time it's the same thing that trips us up. That, and I think that this is universally applicable to whatever we do. When we fancied ourselves more of an academic company than a job board,

it comes back to haunt us. And when we fancy ourselves a job board more than an academic company, it comes back by us. Having one foot firmly in each one of those worlds that you're in, those are the places where we've avoided too much one way, too much the other way. And that thematically, that's always been a challenge and a centering place where we tried to get to.

I probably am the one who speaks most to that, three of us, to be fair. But I think we all kind of express that opinion in one way or another about how we've had more challenges. We've kind of leaned a little bit too much to one side, and then we realized we needed to lean more towards the middle.

Martyn Redstone (20:55.598)
Interesting, really interested getting that balance right, you know, in terms of what type of company are you and what are you delivering and your solutions and all those kinds of things, because I suppose you don't really want to, you know, you're right, you don't really want to think of yourself too much as an academic company because you're serving that industry. I think a lot of people in our industry and actually the wider kind of recruitment industry tend to fall into that quite a lot. So I think that's a...

Valid piece of piece of thought and advice actually Superb absolutely superb. So what's next? What have you got coming up with our higher jobs? Are you are you planning any major? Major activities major projects major transformations. What's coming up over the next kind of 12 24 months for you?

Andrew Hibel (21:46.098)
I think whatever we had planned is kind of as of beginning of 2025 is put on hold for right now. I think really what we've been doing over the past several months is trying to understand best what can help serve our customers now. We have lots of customers who have been affected by what's transpired either on the federal funding perspective, issues related to university equity inclusion.

on issues related to anti-Semitism on campus and so on and so forth. And those who have not yet been affected are worried about how it may come back and affect them. What we can be doing from a recruitment solution, we do have an editorial side that goes specifically to job search strategy and career topics in academia. How are we to respond that and help?

is what we feel our job is, try to get people focused on staffing their teams with quality people. And then on the flip side, candidates who are nervous about what does this mean? I just bought a new house and I have a mortgage or we just had a baby. And now I was thinking about going into academia, but I should still. I will say, I think the one thing for us that I think we can always change permanently is

in America very much so. It used to be that getting a college education was something that was valued universally when we first started. I think being able to show academia its real life and the quality of the positions and the work you do and the meaning you get from that work is something I think you're going to see more thematically from us in everything we do.

Are you going to see something that's going to completely hit you over the head with that? Absolutely not. But we feel like that's part of our responsibility of what we owe the industry that's given us so much. Because I think that that's a voice that we have that's fairly unique and it's important for us to be able to use.

Martyn Redstone (23:58.592)
Superb, absolutely superb. And I think that's such a great optic to kind of finish on, which is sometimes it's not about, it's not about finding something new. It's about, it's about re-steering the ship and, and making sure that you're serving your customers to the best of your ability and doubling down on that. So I think that's an absolutely fantastic place to, finish the conversation on Andrew. And for me, thank you so much for sparing the time to share the story, the history and the benefit of your experience with me today.

Andrew Hibel (24:28.689)
Thank you

Martyn Redstone (24:33.558)
Excellent. Well, you have yourself a great day.

Andrew Hibel (24:35.536)
you as well. Take care.