An institution’s Career Services offerings not only serve traditional undergraduate or soon-to-be alumni, but first generation college students, graduate students, non-traditional and adult learners, and more. The more streamlined and simplified the CRM, the more constituents that benefit from the program’s offerings. Most Career Service CRM requirements can be completed by configuring Salesforce’s Education Cloud objects and using native Salesforce components. When you’re ready to take your Career Services tracking, automation and engagement further, configurations and customizations can be utilized as needed.
We’ve outlined ways Salesforce can set up your Career Services team for success:
Relationship and Affiliation Tracking (the quick win!)
Quickly set up a central database to house constituent records like current students, alumni, volunteers, staff/faculty, industry partners, etc. that gives team members the ability to see constituent information in one place using relationship and affiliation tracking. Relate constituents to each other or to organizations using the Relationship and Affiliation objects in Education Cloud to support job placement and tracking. Utilizing the Attributes object allows teams to track certifications, credentials, etc. And lets not forget the powerful native reporting Salesforce provides that will give a real time glimpse at engagement data using tasks and activities.
Constituent Experience Community
A community can add an extra layer of support to frequently utilized Career Services components and processes like mentoring and networking. For example, Cases can be used for student requests such as scheduling a mock interview, resume review, or appointment scheduling with a career coach. Salesforce Knowledge could be utilized as a repository for career support articles and FAQs. We’ve already mentioned relationship and affliction tracking but it’s important to keep in mind how this native feature can improve data integrity by relating constituents to mentors, mentees, organizations, clubs, groups, etc. Chatter groups so allow collaboration between students, partners, volunteers, mentors and more. If expanded capabilities like a job board or resource center are needed, a custom Salesforce community can turn your CRM interactive.
Events and Workshops
Events are essential to a thriving and growing Career Services program. Your CRM should make creating and managing events a seamless experience integrated with your contacts, partners, processes and more. Use Campaigns to track event details like budget and expenses, ROI, contacts invited and leads generated, opportunities created, and more. You’ll be able to view campaign information from a contact record for an easy-to-access visual of the contact’s engagement. Native but powerful reporting can convey metrics like how many events a constituent attended, volunteer attendees, and event registration rates.
You can also utilize a third party event management tool that integrates with Salesforce to provide increased event management features like event pages, session attendees, ticketing/payments, and online check in.
Consistent Support
Cases provide teams the ability to support and track student interactions with requests or offerings from the Career Services program. Assigning cases types and subjects provides tracking and reporting on common Career Services requests like resume writing support, mock interviews, and graduate school searches. To further track cases, assign incoming cases to individuals or teams based on the type. For example, a mock interview request may be assigned to a student volunteer or talent management specialist, and a first generation student’s request may go to a specialized counselor. In addition to case assignments, case requests can be added to the student community, case history can be tracked down to the student level, and automated reporting can be curated to show how many cases were created, closed, unresolved, related to a specific request,etc.
Constituent Engagement
Native Salesforce tools allow teams to capture any interaction with students from emails and calls to tasks, requests, meetings and event attendance. Optional integrations can include Outlook or Gmail so email and calendar activity can be quickly tied to Salesforce records. 3rd party SMS tools that connect to Salesforce provide additional communication channels that again, would be seamlessly tied to contact records so all activity is captured. To elevate engagement, use Pardot or Marketing Cloud to send mass messages and communication, create group-specific journeys to further student and partner engagement with the Career Services program. For example, eNewsletters, event or workshop marketing, and volunteer communication. All of this engagement can be tied to campaigns and contacts so teams continue to get a comprehensive but single snapshot of their Career Services engagement.
Career Services programs not only bridge the journey between graduation and career, but build long term relationships with students, alumni, partners and organizations. Salesforce can expand the reach of a Career Services program by condensing processes and removing silios, consolidating data and reducing manual data entry, automating reporting, and much more. Our team is here to showcase these features. Let us know how we can help by contacting us through the form below or emailing us at booking@elevation.solutions.
