Your career center is an infinitely valuable resource for students who are looking to find a job, land an internship or just generally prepare for entering the world of their chosen profession. Unfortunately, though, it can sometimes be a challenge to get the word out to students about all the resources available to them through their school’s career center. It’s scary to think that some students may not even know your career center exists, but it’s a reality for many schools. Whether you’re facing an extreme case of students not even knowing they have access to a career center or a more minor issue of students not knowing the full breadth of their career center’s offerings, it’s important to have a strategy in place to spread awareness to students about what their career center can do for them.
In order to customize your outreach to the groups of students that need it the most, you need a way to gather this type of actionable intelligence. You’ll need a method of pinpointing which students are not taking advantage of your career center’s specific offerings so that you can reach out to them with personalized messages. The student engagement dashboards in CSM are an example of this type of tool, as they allow you to segment groups of students based on which services in your career center they have used. After you’ve picked out the students who may need a reminder of your career center’s various offerings, you can use tools like CSM to send them email blasts letting them know about what they’re missing out on. Remember to make your subject lines catchy and relevant to entice students to open your emails.
Consider making a Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram page for your career center, independent of your school’s main social media accounts. Ask your school’s marketing contact to promote the career center pages from the school’s larger accounts so students following those pages can be made aware that the career center is on also social media.
Once you’ve gotten a small following of students, it’s important to keep them engaged by posting interesting content and allowing them to interact with you. Come up with a unique hashtag for your career center, and consider holding occasional social media contests to keep students engaged. An example of this could be something along the lines of, “Tweet about your greatest success using the career center and we’ll randomly pick a winner for a $100 gift card!” Make sure that participants in the contest add your career center’s hashtag to their posts.
One of the simplest, but most effective ways you can attract more students to the career center is by providing them with a worthwhile experience and encouraging them to tell their peers about it. Every time you help a student find an amazing internship or job, remind them to tell their friends about it so their friends can benefit too. If a student is a member of a sorority, sports team or other extracurricular activity, ask that they share their recent career center success with the rest of the group. After you’ve been so helpful to students, they’ll likely be more than willing to spread the word of your career center’s offerings so their classmates can have similarly positive results.