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Remember that old saying about the tree falling, how does it go? Oh right, if a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?

As is the case in almost any industry, your work is only as good as your ability to communicate it effectively. Your career services team, and your institution as a whole, work hard to curate specialized resources, services, and opportunities to support students. Your good intentions aside, often times engagement with these resources is unpredictable at best - or disappointingly low at worst. Not only is the hard work of your staff and admins being overlooked, there’s lots of research that points to a correlation between engagement and general persistence. Very simply, when a student doesn’t engage, they are less likely to be retained. 

Engagement with Career Services can have enormous impact on the student experience. The frequent perception of incoming students is that career resources and programming is more geared toward students ready for the job search, not starting life as a newly minted college student. As career educators, you know how monumental the influence of career programming and resources can be - especially when it happens early in the college journey - and yet transactional activities like interview prep, resume review, and preparing actual applications can seem irrelevant, and even anxiety provoking, for students who don’t yet identify as 'career ready.'  

Almost nothing makes us cheer more loudly than career services scaling their impact on student success.  Check out this piece written by our friend Braden Lanham at BYU on how the Marriott School of Business has achieved 90% (!!!) placement employing a student-led service delivery model under the guidance of Career Center Director Mike Roberts and Director of Operations Melinda Maughan.

This post was originally published on careerleadershipcollective.com 

What if, instead of pushing out largely transactional, event and job related promotions, career service professionals embraced a news feed format and focused on offering career education content that encourages career exploration ahead of recruiting? Fortunately, it’s starting to happen, and when done well, positively influences how students are attracted to concepts, services, and learning

Snapchat and Instagram are a huge part of college campus life these days. An overwhelming number of students use these social media tools; a recent survey done by New York-based advertising company Sumpto found that 77% of college students are using Snapchat daily, and similarly, an ever-increasing number of teenagers and young adults are on Instagram, where almost 90% of users are under 35. The fact is: college-age kids engage and connect largely through social media and this means that career services and other higher ed professionals can leverage these channels to communicate their messages to students.

Here, we want to discuss two specific, largely visual tools, Snapchat and Instagram, and why career service professionals should use them .

When talking to schools, our Founder often says “your ability to serve your students is predicated on your ability to effectively communicate with them.”

Today’s students communicate in fundamentally different ways than their non-millennial predecessors. They use their smartphone’s keyboard, camera and microphone to express themselves, they spend 3.1 hours a day consuming social media, and they almost never read emails not directly targeted to their immediate and personal interests. We are all witness to the biggest shift in communication since the move from radio to television - and the students right outside your office window are the ones leading this revolution.

There are more online resources, third-party apps, and services for career centers than ever. Your career center probably has a library of fantastic online resources scattered across various websites, portals and apps, which means they're most likely hard to find and potentially underutilized. Adding more resources might even confuse your audience base and set you up to compete with your current offerings, decreasing overall utilization.

Before you bring on another resource, whether it be for mentoring, interview prep, or even a whole new career services management system, we encourage you to consider two things...

Employer recruiting on college campuses has been a part of the higher education experience for years. Now, however, with new-found pressure to improve career preparation and student outcomes, recruiting plays a bigger role than ever.

Creating content is hard. You've accumulated all of this insight, but how do you share it with students so that they will listen? This is the hardest part.