The last half century has brought with it a greater focus on accountability, say career services practitioners and employers.

Management and shareholders, among others, now hold the college recruiting function of organizations accountable for how staff spend time, how they recruit, and the number of successful candidates they bring to the organization, explains Vanessa Strauss, senior advisor to director and deputy director, division of administration for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and NACE Past President.

“In the past, we went to many different schools, and did recruiting on a scale where we didn’t have to justify the dollars we spent. Now we do,” she says. “A lot of organizations are moving toward identifying and recruiting at core schools. Because of the increase in accountability, their focus is now narrowed down and driven toward building relationships.”

In career centers, practitioners report increased demand for accountability from internal stakeholders, such as administrators, faculty, and students, and external stakeholders, including parents, alumni, employers, accrediting organizations, and state agencies.

Increased demand for accountability means new performance measures for career services. According to Pat Carretta, associate dean/director of career services at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, when she started working in career services in the early 1970s, she most often was asked to report on “placement” results, typically associated with on-campus recruiting. For instance, she tallied how many companies/ employers recruited on the campus and how many offers/hires resulted from on-campus recruiting.

“We tracked where our graduates went immediately after graduation—employment, grad school, military service, or others,” she explains. “We also reported on how many credential files we mailed in support of students’ applications to graduate school. Our performance was measured to a large degree by the number of students employed by reputable companies or in grad school; by the number of companies who recruited on a regular basis; salaries; and by the reputation of the companies and grad programs.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Carretta says career centers began placing more emphasis on user information, especially as services expanded to include career counseling/advising, career/jobsearch preparation workshops, career resources, job fairs, and more.

Although today’s career centers still report on the “placement” results or post-graduation plans of recent graduates, Carretta says that other performance measures have gained ground.

“We have moved from simply measuring student/employer outcomes to measuring and reporting on student/employer satisfaction and more importantly, to measuring student learning—the impact our programs have on what students learn and what skills they develop and are able to apply—and on students’ attitudes and beliefs,” she says.

Sam Ratcliffe, director of career services at Virginia Military Institute, agrees that models that emphasize student learning outcomes are now more prevalent.

“Just as career services units have evolved from placement offices into centers offering comprehensive services and programs, expectations for demonstrating accountability have become increasing complex and important,” he says. “This trend parallels what has occurred at the institutional level as there has been a shift in the use of prestige-based models (what students know and can do) that emphasize student learning outcomes, i.e. how well institutions develop student talent and abilities. The approach to accountability and assessment is becoming increasingly multi-faceted.”

During the last several years, Ratcliffe says, there has been a shift from demonstrating productivity (for example, student contacts) to adding satisfaction measures to indicate effectiveness using a consumer-based management model to defining desired student learning outcomes and documenting specific institutional or unit influences on the achievement of those outcomes.

Strauss believes that, on the employer side, it will.

“I think we can expect more of the same,” she notes. “We will continue to be required to get results in recruiting and retaining candidates. It’s great to hire people, but we have to have programs in place to keep them. Our model is not to retain new employees for 20 years anymore. Now, our aim is to retain employees for four or five years. For the current generation, there is a cost-benefit to keeping them for at least four or five years.”

For career centers, Ratcliffe says the shift toward increased accountability requires increased diligence by career services practitioners.

Says Ratcliffe: “If 360-degree accountability expectations are becoming more prevalent with stakeholders from all sides having specific interests, without career services practitioners being mission focused, politically savvy, and astute in demonstrating unit effectiveness, the 360-degree accountability can become 360-degree harassment. Practitioners will need to be able to defend specific desired outcomes, assessment/evaluation strategies, the results, and the decisions made based upon those results.”