| Teen entrepreneurs create job resource for students Kidspeak interviews the founders of Careers4Teens, an Internet company that provides free job resources for students. By Amy Schimmel SCR*TEC |
 hanks to two teen entrepreneurs from Kansas City, Missouri; high school
and college students now have a new resource for finding jobs. Michael and
Ephren, both high school seniors, decided to start their own Internet company
by creating a career resource just for students! Careers4Teens is a free online resource
where students will find employment opportunities in businesses throughout
the Kansas City metropolitan area. Students can visit the site and browse
through a variety of job listings, then e-mail their resume to any companies
listed. Businesses pay a fee to post their job listings on the site. The idea for this business evolved from Michael and Ephren's involvement in FBLA [Future Business Leaders of America]. Michael, who is president of the FBLA chapter at his school, had been in contact with many area businesses last year that had expressed having difficulty finding employees because of the low unemployment rate in the area. |
| "When
you go on the Internet to search for jobs, it's always for professional
people," said Ephren. It was time to start providing students and new graduates
with better opportunities in the work force. |
 ichael and Ephren
felt that young people who were looking for jobs would benefit from a Web
site that listed occupations that were available in their area. "When you
go on the Internet to search for jobs, it's always for professional people,"
said Ephren. It was time to start providing students and new graduates with
better opportunities in the work force. Their answer: "[a] list of a whole
bunch of jobs catered strictly [toward] teenagers."
The design and development of the site took place over the summer. "We started work on it in May [and] we opened the site August first officially," said Michael. Ephren is mainly involved in the site design and development while Michael concentrates on the business side. With all of the work required to get the site and the business up and running, Michael and Ephren worked as long as 13 hours on some days. The first step was contacting the businesses Michael had met during a job fair the previous month. They said that most people were very responsive when they started soliciting clients for their Web site. Local job boards, the yellow pages, employment newspapers, and listening to teens talk about where they work all proved to be successful ways to find new clients. |
|
 hen asked if they've
had any other help, Michael said, "Really it is just the two of us. We did
have a friend who is a lawyer glance at the partnership agreement. We also
have a hired accountant. As far as day-to-day operations [though], we don't
have help at all."
Once they had established themselves, they found that keeping the business going was the next issue to address. Though it was exciting to be receiving payments from numerous companies who wished to advertise on Careers4Teens, the boys found that advertising the site itself was essential, but did not always come free of charge. Michael, who handles the business affairs, said that, "You have to look at it not as a Web site, but as a business. The site itself is not that expensive; the expensive part is advertising. If we had a lot of clients and we were pulling in a lot of revenue, but we didn't spend any money on advertising, we wouldn't have clients very long. If we don't advertise to the teenagers and no one goes to the site, it's not worthwhile for the employers. It's a catch twenty-two: do you spend more time trying to find clients to bring in money, or do you spend more time trying to advertise and trying to keep the clients you have? You need the money from the clients to advertise, but you need the advertising money to keep the clients. It's tough to balance. Advertising is extremely expensive considering we didn't have a huge capital infusion. We're only seventeen years old, we don't have venture capitalists financing the whole company."
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| "Part
of our goal is [to bring] in new clients this month. That is [why] we want
to try to start [doing] radio advertising by the new year" said Michael. |
 n an effort to
advertise cost effectively, they have found creative ways to advertise.
They go to schools and place flyers on students' cars, they run ads in school
newspapers, and they hand out flyers at college fairs. Word of mouth has
also been very important to the success of Careers4Teens; teachers have
been very helpful by telling students about the site.
Michael and Ephren continually search for ways to advertise for free, however, soon they hope to start using some paid venues to promote the site. "Part of our goal is [to bring] in new clients this month. That is [why] we want to try to start [doing] radio advertising by the new year," said Michael. After only two full months on the Web, the site has received an average of 200 hits per week. "I wish there were more on there," Ephren commented, but the site and business are still in their early stages and are no where near hitting the downward slope. They have plans to expand the site in the future and are even hoping to take it nationwide next year. |
 phren, whose main responsibilities
in the company are HTML coding, site design, and constructing databases,
said that they had some new things in store for the near future. "We're
pretty much going to automate the whole system [so that] companies can come
online and pay." Ephren says the plan is to make it so that companies "can
create their own ads, post them, and let the site run itself." Until this
point, Ephren has been responsible for designing an ad for every client.
The new method of design on the site would make it possible for an employer
to go to the site, enter the information they want included in the ad into
an online form, and then the computer would create the ad. Ephren says that
this method "increases our ability to take the site nationwide and let everybody
in the country post ads for teenagers. We [hope] to turn it into a community
network." They plan to have it automated early next year. The duo already has an enormous head start on the competition. "All the other teenage job sites have one page up and they say 'we're coming soon,' but they don't have anything up." Ephren says that they are "going to try to get in there and run with the larger job sites and offer everything that they don't, such as chat rooms and discussion forums where teenagers can discuss what's happening on the job. Another feature is a career development center, [which will include information on] how to write resumes, job interview questions, what to say and what not to say, legal interview questions, stuff that you usually need to know to get a job or get out of a job if it comes down to that."
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| ith
the boys in their senior year of high school and soon facing college, the
question of whether or not to continue the business weighs heavily on their
minds. "We're discussing whether we're going to keep it or sell it," Ephren
said. "For right now ... we're going to make it more affordable [to employers]
to kind of build up the volume. It really all depends on how it pans out
before we go off to college. If it's generating enough money to pay for
my college, I'm not going to get rid of it."
Their business continues to grow and expand.
Michael and Ephren spend three to four hours daily keeping things going.
With aspirations to achieve national status, it may seem that these two
young men are carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders; but,
that is not the case at all. They love what they do and are working hard
to get in there and compete with the big dogs. |
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