Situation
Back in 2019, Brad Mullenix, Director of Career and Alumni Services, was tasked with finding a new career services management platform for Pensacola Christian College (PCC). With their old platform, “we were just limited in the resources available to us for tracking our career services programming. A lot of what we did was heavily dependent on our IT department, and they already had a long to-do list outside of our needs,” Mullenix said. In addition to independence from their IT department, customization, ease of use, and overall efficiency were the driving factors for finding a new career services platform. Mullenix noted, “We needed a platform that would automatically push jobs to us. So, if our contacts did not have a lot of openings available to push to us, we wanted to receive a list of curated jobs that matched exactly what we were looking for. This was a tremendous need for us.” With a clear idea of what kind of platform would fit PCC’s Career Services best, Mullenix began doing research to find a new career services management platform.
“We had a list of needs for PCC’s Career Services and when we started doing research into who were the major players, Symplicity was the clear leader. Symplicity had everything we were looking for and more. There really isn’t another platform that compares; Symplicity CSM is on another level."
Brad Mullenix,
Director of Career and Alumni Services
Solution
PCC started the implementation process for Symplicity CSM in June of 2020. Anna Maxwell, Alumni and Career Services Coordinator, said her department had a very specific timeline for when they wanted to go live with CSM. “When we first met Eileen with the Symplicity implementation team, I walked her through our six-month and three-month plan and what we wanted to accomplish at certain month markers along the way,” Maxwell said, “Working with Eileen and her team was so great! Eileen was amazing with her adaptability to exactly what we needed and her willingness to jump on a call with us at any time.” PCC’s Career Services was able to meet their deadline for launch with the help of Symplicity’s implementation team. Mullenix added, “It was just fantastic. We were able to get everything ready to go about two weeks before students returned to campus and that’s really attributed to Eileen and her efforts to make it happen.”
Success
The PCC’s Career Services team is thrilled to have access to many of CSM’s features, especially the reporting module. “The reporting module has been game changing for our office because we can see who actually is on the platform and who isn’t. We can also pick and choose which students we want to target and which we don’t,” Maxwell stated, “I feel like I can report on any piece of data, which was an ability we didn’t have before, and that insight helps us make long-term and short-term decisions for our office.” Ultimately, it is the cost-savings that CSM has brought to PCC’s Career Services that their institution finds a success. Mullenix said, “If we were without Symplicity, we would’ve had to hire someone to go out there and bring employers to us that wanted to list jobs for our students and that would’ve been a tough sell to justify hiring someone for that. I don’t think we would’ve done it so there’s tremendous value in the time and cost-savings CSM brings.” PCC’s Career Services is looking forward to utilizing more modules within CSM and streamlining overall operational processes as a result.
“What I love about Symplicity is that we were able to reinvent the resources we have available to our students that weren’t available before such as resume templates and having a resources bank. The CSM modules are so customizable and flexible that we were able to take everything we wanted to use and make it our own."
Anna Maxwell,
Alumni and Career Services Coordinator
