Careers and employability: a placement rate you can defend
Record what each student is looking for, keep employer partners in the sales pipeline you already use, publish vacancies and report placement outcomes for accreditation. A rate nobody measured is reported as not measured, never as zero. Part of the Education vertical, optional, and off until an administrator turns it on.
The Careers and employability block sits at the end of the Education screen. It covers the part of a student’s life the school is judged on and rarely writes down: what they are looking for, who is hiring, and what happened to them after they left. Almost all of it is built out of records you already keep.
The profile, the employer and the vacancy
A career profile says what a person is looking for: the role, the industry, the contract, the work mode, how far they will move, when they are available and the skills they claim. Nothing about who they are is retyped. Name, contact and documents stay on the person record, where they already live. Every field starts as not declared, and that is deliberate. Marking somebody as looking for a job because a form wanted a value would be an invention, and the placement report is built on top of these answers.
An employer partner is the company record you already have, and the partnership is your standard sales opportunity. There is no second B2B pipeline for employers, because a pipeline of hiring companies is still a pipeline. The HR contact goes into the buying committee that already exists, with a role like any other stakeholder. Nothing about the company is retyped either.
A vacancy is a job opening. It is not a sales opportunity, and the two are never added together: one is your revenue, the other is somebody’s job. Each vacancy can carry the employer’s own reference number, so importing the same feed twice updates the vacancy instead of creating a second copy of it. Leave the number of openings blank when the employer did not say how many. Blank means not declared. Zero means no position is open, which is a different fact.
Fit between a candidate and a vacancy is scored on four things: skills, programme, work mode and availability. Only what both sides actually declared is scored. If the vacancy lists no required skills, skills drop out of the calculation instead of counting as a failure, and the screen writes out what the score was based on and what was never compared.
When nothing was declared on either side there is no basis for a score at all. Those candidates go into a list of their own, of people without enough to compare, and never to the bottom of a ranking with a zero beside their name. Zero says something about the candidate. Not compared says something about us, and it is the true one.
Three different silences
There is no default outcome. A person has a placement line only when somebody asked and wrote the answer down, against a survey date. And silence is not one thing, it is three, which the report keeps apart. Never asked: the graduate has no line at all and stays outside both the numerator and the denominator, so they are never counted as unplaced. No response: you asked and nobody answered, which is a fact about your follow-up, not about them. Still looking: they answered, they have not found work, and that is a measured negative, so it belongs in the denominator.
The difference is not academic. In a class of 100 where you reached 40, found 30 in work and 10 still looking, the placement rate is 75% of the people you measured, not 30%. Reporting 30% would count 60 people you never spoke to as unemployed. The report shows 75%, states that the denominator is 40, names the 60 who were never asked, and marks the rate as a floor, because the answers you are missing could move it either way.
The cohort report
The cohort comes from your alumni list. The class year is the one the school declared, or the one derived from a completed enrolment when nothing was declared. Nothing here defines a class year a second time, because a graduating class that exists in two places will eventually disagree with itself.
Two denominators come out together, and they answer different questions. The rate over the people who were in the market answers: of those we measured and who wanted work, how many found it. The rate over the whole cohort answers: of everyone who graduated, how many are known to be placed. Accreditors ask for one or the other and rarely say which, so both are shown, each with its basis written out: what counted as placed, what was in the denominator, and what was left out of it.
Two warnings appear when they should. If anybody in the cohort did not answer or was never asked, the rate is marked as a floor rather than the real number. If people completed an enrolment that year and are not on the alumni list yet, the report says how many. That second one matters more than it looks: a missing graduate shrinks the cohort, and a smaller cohort with the same placements inflates the rate. Link them before you publish.
Two more fields describe how solid a line is. Working in field is a judgement about the job, and not assessed does not count as out of field: nobody looked, and saying otherwise would be an accusation against the programme. Evidence records who said so, whether that is the graduate, the employer who confirmed it or the institution that verified it. The report counts how many lines are not self reported, because an accreditor will ask, and the honest answer to that question is a count, not an adjective.
Pay
Pay is restricted to whoever administers the system, on the individual line and in the summary. The aggregate is withheld when fewer than three people reported pay, because a median of two people is those two salaries under another name, and in a small class everyone knows who they are. Pay reported in different currencies or over different periods is never folded into one figure: the summary says the basis is mixed and stops there. When nobody reported pay there is no summary at all, and that is not a pay of zero.
Privacy
Showing a profile to an employer is sharing with a third party, so it obeys the data sharing consent this person already gave or refused. There is no new checkbox here: revoke the consent and the profile stops being shared. Even with consent, the employer view is built field by field from a fixed list: what they are looking for, their skills, their programme, their availability and their portfolio. Grades, risk scores, advising notes, finances, documents and date of birth are never in it, and no permission can widen it to include them.
One honest limitation to close with. This does not connect to external job boards: it does not publish your vacancies anywhere else, it does not read applications from a careers site, and it will not confirm on its own that a graduate found work. Somebody has to ask. What the system guarantees is that when nobody asked, the report says nobody asked.