On April 30th, the CACEE Ontario Regional Advisory Board hosted a virtual session, Measuring Impact: Using Data to Demonstrate the ROI of Career and Campus Recruitment Programming. As thought leaders representing both employers and post-secondary career centres, each speaker shared how adopting data-informed approaches has supported their respective efforts to attract talent, strengthen employer-student connections, and optimize service delivery.

We're in an exciting stage of transformation in our data journey...

Patricia Eddu from CPA Ontario began the conversation by sharing the two-fold challenge her team faced in their student recruitment work: A lack of lead differentiation combined with a lengthy, cumbersome event registration process had resulted in overly broad, ineffective marketing campaigns and high rates of disengagement among initially interested students.

Recognizing these challenges, Patricia’s team embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of their lead management system. Firstly, they acted to optimize their CRM Salesforce to integrate profile creation with event registration. This not only served to significantly streamline a process that had originally taken 30 clicks to complete but also use data from created profiles to deliver more focused, relevant interactions. For example, they could now identify high school students nearing graduation and provide them with relevant information about transitioning to post-secondary education.

Leveraging the potential in data analysis, her team took things a step further in tracking engagement status. By assigning weights to various activities, they could measure lead engagement and tailor their communication strategies accordingly. Highly engaged leads received detailed program information, while less engaged leads were nurtured with more introductory content to build interest.

Through taking these steps, Patricia and her colleagues are better equipped to foster relationships, which has been reflected in year-over-year statistics, notably a 22% growth in lead acquisition. In developing these data-driven improvements, they are more adaptive to changing student needs and engagement, and are poised to further explore advanced analytics to continuously improve recruitment strategies.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen in the career and campus recruitment space—especially for in-person events—is simply measuring impact in a meaningful way...

The theme of harnessing data to facilitate student engagement carried over in a discussion of career fairs led by Shane Malcolm of Northeastern University - Toronto and Daniel Shalinsky of Withe.  They shared how their partnership resulted in transforming the career fair experience to make it more impactful for students and employers alike. Shane noted that a common struggle for any career centre lay in understanding the actual opportunities secured from their career fairs. Daniel built upon this by sharing that while these events offer means of engagement, siloed employer data and a reliance on post-event surveys meant that the interactions that typically take place are more akin to a ‘blind date.’ 

The shift to virtual fairs during COVID-19 provided a powerful opportunity for data collection and impact measurement in the career fair context, with Daniel highlighting the potential in leveraging real-time data. The Withe platform can also translate this opportunity to in-person events, using three essential metrics: student interest, booth-level engagement, and feedback loops. These metrics can then help career centres allocate resources strategically as well as guide an employer's engagement on campus.

Shane detailed how through partnering with Withe, they optimized data collection around connection points between employers and students. With the insights provided through this data, combined with advantages in Northeastern’s smaller footprint, there was space to re-envision the traditional career fair model and how its impact is evaluated.

This past January, Northeastern moved to spotlight career fairs. These targeted events offered more niche and intimate connections between students and recruiters, with dedicated time slots for interaction. This approach led to a 50% increase in engagement compared to traditional fairs, with students feeling more confident and satisfied with their interactions, and employers utilizing feedback and engagement data to inform their hiring decisions. In leveraging this technology, Northeastern was also able to focus on facilitating more meaningful human connections.

Data helps organizations and career centres to tell the story...

The third case study speaker, Katherine St. Louis of Wilfrid Laurier University, shared the multi-faceted role data plays for Laurier in enhancing services and stakeholder engagement.

Katherine provided an overview of the Career Centre at Laurier, noting that the Career Centre's "home" is in both Student Affairs and Teaching and Learning, and also provides a wide range of services across multiple campuses. Data has become foundational to all of the Career Centre's activities. The types of data collected includes service user statistics, evaluations for appointments and workshops, employer engagement data, graduate outcomes, experiential learning participation, and the results of a variety survey touch points with key stakeholders. This data has in turn been used to understand the needs of students and has informed service improvements, new program development, and marketing and engagement activities. It also helps her team contribute to best practices conversations with career centre colleagues across Canada.

Beyond their student-facing services, this proactive approach to data helps to inform the Career Centre’s wider engagement with the Laurier community, including accountability to student governments, outreach to prospective students, and alumni and donor stewardship. Katherine emphasized the importance and power of using data to contribute to the larger institutional story.

Laurier's strategic plan (2019-2024) included future readiness as a key pillar and the data collected by the Career Centre, particularly around the Laurier Competency Framework, helps illustrate how Laurier students are prepared for their futures. Career Centre data about graduate outcomes and experiential learning is also used in metrics provided to the provincial government through the strategic mandate agreement. Katherine emphasized that while it is an investment to engage in collecting metrics on this scale day-to-day, the data collected is invaluable for establishing a presence and building connections across the institutional landscape and with community and employer partners.

In closing...

Each of the featured speakers in this session shared compelling stories of how the intentional use of data has paved the way for significant improvements in how they optimize processes, address challenges, and facilitate positive outcomes for practitioners, employers, and students alike.

With active Q&As following each case study presentation, it further highlighted not only he interest in the topic, but also the powerful means of community connection and knowledge exchange CACEE membership offers through its slate of programming, resources, and events! 

If you or your colleagues have your own data journey to share, are looking to spotlight tools or resources you have developed, or have areas of expertise that would be of benefit to the CACEE community, we'd love to feature them in a future blog post or in an upcoming session!  Reach out to us at info@cacee.com.

And, if you're a professional supporting the journey from post-secondary education to career success and not yet a part of CACEE, what are you waiting for?! - Join today!

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Kris Gies (he/him) is Manager, Career Education at the Experiential Learning Hub - University of Guelph. Prior to taking on this operational leadership role, he was a career advisor focused on working with  students in Ontario Veterinary College programs.He completed a PhD at the University of Guelph in 2010. Kris is a proud member of CACEE and the Ontario Regional Advisory Board.