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GradLeaders: Increase Student/Alumni Engagement & Boost Your Employment Statistics

It is safe to say that nearly every Graduate Business School Career Services office wants to increase student engagement with their office and their chosen system.  
It is safe to say that nearly every Graduate Business School Career Services office wants to increase student engagement with their office and their chosen system.  Additionally, most Career Services professionals would like their office to receive a greater portion of credit in the “Job Offer Source” category on the employment reports.
Before describing the solution, let us present some supporting statistics* for the proposed solution. 

It is a fact, nothing brings students into your platform more than job opportunities.  Our stats show that 78% of all student page views are comprised of job search / view and interview search / view pages.  Sure, students also come into the system to make coaching appointments, sign up for events and workshops, research company contacts, etc.  But nothing drives quality engagement more than job opportunities.  For schools that also offer Alumni career services, the percentage is even higher.  For most school alumni, job searching is the singular reason to access the Career Services system.

Another indisputable fact:  Students are willing to work at this; they look through a lot of jobs to find the one(s) they want to apply to.
  1. In the GradLeaders systems of most business schools the average job views per student is 119 jobs/interviews viewed per student.  
  2. For a few larger schools, where they receive more postings into their system, we have seen some classes where the average is as high as 210 jobs/interviews viewed per student.
  3. With all of this activity searching and viewing jobs, Graduate Business students average 15-22 job applications per student.  Variance is based on the school and class year. 
 
Finally, despite the abundance of job-related activity in the Career Services system, across our business schools using our employment reporting module, 57% of job offers reported an Offer of “School Facilitated Activities”.  This implies that 43% of the students are needing to look elsewhere to find their internship or full-time position.   We know that the Career Services professionals in your offices are working hard, advising the students, and helping them find their careers.  But we need to improve on that 57% Job Offer Source number, and get your office the credit that it deserves.

Let us get to the proposed solution.  As a concept, it is pretty simple:  You need more high-quality job postings under your Career Services system banner to drive that Job Offer Source number in your favor.   Most Graduate Business Schools seem to have between 50 and 500 active job postings at any given time, with variance based on the size of the school and the time of year.   All of the jobs were either posted directly to your school system by recruiters, or networked in by your system provider via other schools on the platform.  For most schools, that averages to less than 1 active posting per student.  And if you add in your alumni, well, that number is not very good.  What if you could add some zeros to that number, and have 50,000 active postings under your banner? What about 100,000?
GradLeaders has a new tool that we call “A.I. JobMatch”, which launched in Fall 2022.  We have integrated with a third party firm that enables us to bring in essentially every publicly posted job in North America under your Career Services site.   These postings are sourced from public job boards as well as the corporate careers web sites of hundreds of top employers.  At any given time, we have up to 5 million postings at our disposal.  For graduate business schools, we typically place a filter on the postings, so that only jobs that require a Master's degree or higher will flow into your system.  Your students and alumni do not need all 5 million jobs that we could provide, but the 50,000 to 100,000 high-quality Masters level jobs that we have on any given day would be really helpful!

With all of this volume, we have also brought in a lot of smart searching tools to help your students and alumni find the jobs that interest them.  There is semantics-based searching so that a student that searches on “Investment Manager” will also see jobs that match related terms like “Portfolio Manager”, “Asset Manager”, etc.  There is also a proximity search so users can search within XX miles of a particular city. 

For decades graduate business school systems have typically only received the job postings that their campus aligned recruiters post for their students. We believe that your students' opportunities should not be limited by the recruiters' posting choices.  Seemingly your students agree, since 43% of them are going elsewhere to find their job.
See the example screen below.  In this case, the student searched for “Marketing” and the organization named “Apple.”  The Apple recruiter had posted two great marketing jobs directly into the Career Services system.  They are first on this list, and tagged with the badge that states “CMC Approved”, to tell the student that these are jobs targeted to your school.  But look at the rest of the results.  There are 13 more Masters level marketing jobs at Apple in the A.I. JobMatch results!  These are great jobs that your student would never see in your current system. Jobs like these lead to the 43% of student job offers not attributed to Career Services!!


Since the launch of A.I. JobMatch last fall, GradLeaders school customers that have adopted it are experiencing staggering engagement increases.

Here are two examples:
Graduate Business School:
  January 2022 January 2023 % Increase
Job Postings Viewed 1,523 1,944 27.6%
Job Applications 302 352 16.5%
 
University Alumni Office:
  January 2022 January 2023 % Increase
Job Postings Viewed 155 1,540 893%
Job Applications 9 97 977%
 
The Graduate Business School has had a significant uptick in student engagement and activity. Job Search activity and Job “favoriting” is also way up. It seems a certainty that the student satisfaction will be higher as well.  We can also assume that the percentage increase in applications will likely lead to a proportional increase in Job Offer Source = “School-Facilitated”.   We will know that in Fall 2023. 

As for the University Alumni office, their job board engagement was at an all-time low until they rolled out A.I. JobMatch.  The turnaround has been nothing short of revolutionary for them, and we certainly would expect that Alumni satisfaction (and charitable donations) might follow in the near future. 
If you would like to learn more about how GradLeaders A.I. JobMatch could work for your school, please contact us at demo@gradleaders.com.    
 
* All statistics gathered from aggregated Graduate Business School usage of the GradLeaders platform over the last 10 years.
 

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