During her junior year at William Smith, Rachel Bell and a childhood friend, Sara Sutton, took time off from college to found the Web-based job-matching service, JobDirect.com. JobDirect connects college-level job-seekers and career placement offices with employers specifically seeking to recruit recent college graduates, grad students and college level interns. Through nation-wide marketing programs, JobDirect.com developed a searchable database of over half a million college-level candidates. With registrants from more than 2,400 colleges and universities, JobDirect provides the most qualified college-level recruits available to companies ranging from Fortune 100's to start-ups across a broad range of industries. Bell and Sutton sold JobDirect to Korn Ferry for $35 million in 2001. Bell returned to William Smith soon after to finish her degree in sociology.
Bell and JobDirect have been featured on programs such as MTV News, ABC World News, CNN Headline News, Good Morning America, The Today Show and Bloomberg Financial News. She was a finalist in Ernst&Young's NY/CT "Entrepreneur of the Year" and received Inc. Magazine's "Marketing Masters Award". She is involved in organizations that help empower young women and girls, such as An Income of Her Own and Campus Start Up.
Bell resides in the West Village in New York City, and is working on her master's at Columbia University.
The following article appeared in the Winter 1999 issue of the Pulteney Street Survey:
"It's not uncommon for college seniors to start to panic about job prospects after graduation. For Rachel Bell '96, the panic came early. An individual major focused in education at William Smith, Bell had a tough time finding an internship during the summer of her junior year. She eventually found a position through a family friend, but the experience haunted her. Bell's friend, Sara Sutton, had the same trouble. She would search the web to find an internship, with no results. Bell and Sutton figured there had to be a better way to connect college students with internships and jobs. That was the seed that sprouted the Internet employment service, JobDirect.
Instead of heading back to school for their senior years (Sutton to University of California-Berkley), Bell and Sutton raised $60,000 in investment capital from family and acquaintances and set to work on their plan. "The Internet was still a relatively new thing in 1995," says Bell. "We were afraid if we waited a year that someone else would take our idea and do it."
The first year was a huge learning process for the budding entrepreneurs. Employees were hired and fired. The first version of the database was a failure. By spring, they formed an outside board of directors and hired professional management.
The idea for JobDirect was to charge businesses a fee to use the site, while students could post their resumes for free. But they had to get the word out. Thus JobDirect was born. Bell and Sutton bought a recreational vehicle and equipped it with 15 laptop computers. They hired a team of graffiti artists from the Bronx to spray paint the exterior to look like their website. Then they embarked on a promotional tour of college campuses to promote the site. After 43 campuses—only 18 months after Bell and Sutton conceived of the idea—www.JobDirect.com contained the CVs of 5,000 young job hunters, and the company received significant media attention.
Today, the company has three RVs that make twice-yearly campus tours as well as visits to popular summer concert arenas. JobDirect's database contains some 80,000 resumes, and the company has more than 100 clients, including Price Waterhouse, Sun Microsystems, and Teach for America.
"Coming to William Smith was a huge influence on me," says Bell, who is in the process of finishing an independent study to complete her bachelor's degree. "…Two teachers in particular, Betty Bayer (psychology) and Cindy Sutton (education) taught me independence and how to work hard."
She's gotten plenty of practical experience on her own, which is definitely paying off. "We want every student to be thinking they've got to JobDirect their resume," says Bell. "We want to be the number-one way students start looking for jobs."
Contribution: Co-Founder of JobDirect.com
Hometown: Pittsburgh, Pa.
College Activities: Lacrosse, Helen Heath Scholar
Major: Social and Political Diversities of Minorities