Spotlight for Career Services Professionals
Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals

How can STEAM students and potential employers better match up? That was one of three challenges addressed during the NACE 60th Anniversary Innovation Challenge at NACE16.

Team Disconnect—composed of Francine Blume of the University of Maryland, Jim Bondi of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Amy Fruehling of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Engineering, Ben Onukwube of ConocoPhillips, and Chris Miciek of Thomas Jefferson University—created a platform called College Career Connect (C3) as a lead-in to career fairs or on-campus interviews.

“Employers do not realize the full value offered by broader student populations,” Miciek says. “Those students do not realize the range of applicable skills they have to offer employers.”

C3 offers a career center version of Tindr in which employers and STEAM students build a multi-level pitch to each other allowing them to match up skills. The employer side and the student side each has four levels:

• Level 1
  • Employers see students’ soft skills represented by icons and badges
  • Students see the skills employers seek represented by icons
• Level 2
  • Employers feature a 30- to 60-second company culture video
  • Students provide their elevator pitch (preferably with them out of the picture)
• Level 3
  • Employers feature a position description and a problem-solve pitch: Why is this position valuable?
  • Students make a pitch detailing the problems they want to solve
• Level 4
  • Employers give students the chance to be put on the interview schedule or the career fair schedule
  • The employer gets access to the students’ resumes

As Team Disconnect notes, Level Four is the reward level. C3—the team adds—enables employers to fulfill the tool’s motto: “Prefer the person … not the position.”

During NACE16 in Chicago, conference attendees joined 2015-16 NACE President Dawn Carter and members of the NACE Board of Directors in the NACE 60th Anniversary Innovation Challenge. Sponsored by Intuit, the challenge allowed teams to brainstorm, problem-solve, and establish best practices around three primary themes: STEAM, students with disabilities, and leveraging the liberal arts degree. The winning teams’ submissions are being covered in Spotlight. For the winning entry in the “students with disabilities” category, see Overcoming the Lack of Communication and Information About Disability Services, and for the winning entry in the “leveraging the liberal arts degree” category, see Translator Tool Would Help Students, Employers Communicate Liberal Arts Skills.