Measuring the Success of a College Career Service Office
I am fortunate enough to be the moderator of the College Recruiter discussion list at the Electronic Recruiting Exchange, a group which has 861 members as of 7/21/06. A question that was recently posted to the group asked how to make college career service offices more relevant to students as very few students use the services of their college career service offices and the writer wanted to increase that number. I agree that career service offices are grossly under utilized by students, but as I mulled over the issue for a few days I came to the realization that the problem has at least two sides to it. In addition to the offices being under utilized, many of them also measure their effectiveness incorrectly.
I spoke at a college recruiting several years ago when this topic came up. An attendee from MonsterTRAK said that he had seen a study that indicated that only 14 percent of college seniors have ever physically visited their career service office and that it was quite challenging for their business to get students to use their site when they aren't using the services of their career service offices because their site depends so heavily upon the effectiveness of the career service offices. He felt that career service offices should not measure their effectiveness by the number of students who participate in on-campus interview, career counseling, career fairs, etc. but instead on the outcomes: how many students find a job in their desired career field with six months of graduation.
I believe that his belief was correct. Focusing on how many students walk through your door or how many resumes you help write or any of the other tactical issues causes you to lose sight of the strategic issues which are the most important: are your students finding the right jobs in the right timeframe? Stop defining success by the successful completion of tasks and instead define success by the outcomes that really matter.
Successful organizations do not measure the success of their sales people by how many sales calls those sales people make. They measure their success by their sales. Similarly, successful career service offices should want to measure their success by their outcomes rather than by their daily tasks.
ALMOST!
I totally agree that visits, especially in a digital age, don't mean a lot.
Plus, you'd imagine that if you gave students the right tools and guidance in freshmen year, they wouldn't need to visit again... ("teaching them to fish").
"how many students find a job in their desired career field with six months of graduation." isn't quite the right stat either, though. For example, many students are finance majors and wind up taking jobs in the high net worth investing area, which is essentially a sales job, not an analytical finance position. This area recruits heavily and markets well on campus, but there's high turnover after a few years--it doesn't turn out to be for everyone.
I think career services needs to work more with the alumni office to figure out their success rate. The stat I want to see is job satisfaction one year into their job, two years, three years, etc....
Thank you for your comment and elevation of the thought process. I believe that measuring the outcomes by looking at the employment rate of graduates six months after graduation is valid but that your suggestion of measuring job satisfaction one, two, three, etc. years after graduation is an even better metric.