College students from the Class of 2025 looking to enter the job market should highlight on their resumes the attributes and skills they developed in their classwork and through their various experiential assignments. But which attributes and skills are most important to employers?

As a job candidate, students should pursue openings where their skills match the company’s needs, and by dissecting a job description and ensuring those key words find their way into their resume, students can stand out during the screening process.

Landmark College, an institution exclusively for students who learn differently including those on the autism spectrum, champions a strengths-based model and gives students the skills and strategies they need to achieve their goals.

Because Liberty Mutual Insurance hires hundreds of interns a year, it equips interns with a wide range of skills and has the skill profile of an intern closely align with its early career roles to prepare interns for potential future full-time roles.

Although new college graduates looking to enter the workforce and employers hiring these graduates agree on which competencies are most important for job candidates to hone, their perception of student proficiency in them differs.

When employers consider skills and practice skills-based hiring and skills-based networking, they bring in a more diverse slate of candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, says Asha Aravindakshan.

Liberty Mutual takes a very targeted approach to the sources of talent they try to attract, engage, and hire. This extends far beyond a traditional target school list.

After witnessing the impact that the pandemic had on early undergraduate students from underrepresented groups in the tech industry, IBM scaled up its early talent ID program.

University of Idaho Career Services created the “Career Services Internship Certificate Program” approximately five years ago to give undergraduate interns the knowledge, skills, and abilities to transition to the professional workforce.

This case study by the NACE Principles for Ethical Professional Practice Committee addresses the ethical issues involved when faculty refer and rank students for employers and offers recommendations for how career center staff can resolve the issues.

Collaboration among campus offices is a critical aspect in supporting students with disabilities during their search for employment.

Key aspects of building an effective neurodiverse hiring program are having a sustained supply of candidates and getting buy in from within.

Legal issues and questions around preemployment testing range from when a test is appropriate to how to conduct a test to how an employer can and should use the results.

As they are reviewing college graduates’ resumes this year, employers are focused on finding evidence of candidates’ problem-solving skills and teamwork abilities.

With fewer employers screening job candidates by GPA, it is increasingly important that college graduates demonstrate certain key attributes on their resumes.

Employers report that internship experience is the most influential factor they consider when deciding between two otherwise equally qualified job candidates.

There are differences and similarities in the attributes employers seek when deciding between two qualified candidates for a full-time job and for an internship or co-op.

The key for reference providers is to know what information should and can be disclosed, and what legal ramifications arise as a result of improper disclosures.

Many career services professionals are asked to prescreen candidates for employers—to identify their “best” students. So, too, are faculty members. Beyond a host of ethical issues involved in such a request, there are legal implications.

When choosing between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, employers deem having internship experience—with the organization or within its industry—to be the most influential factors.

In this advisory opinion, the National Association of Colleges and Employers explains that career centers should not select students for employers to interview for jobs or internships and reviews the ethical underpinnings of that opinion.

Employers use background checks to determine if an individual is suitable for a position within the organization. Recently, however, employers have been running into significant roadblocks in the use and application of background checks, and some are now being challenged in the courts for conducting background checks on potential applicants.

New graduates and their potential employers can agree on which skills are most important for job candidates, but differ on how proficient new graduates are in those abilities.