Students learn what they want from Career Shift

Home Campus Students learn what they want from Career Shift
Students learn what they want from Career Shift
Duncan Voyles helped by Ethan Greb in Career Services. Matthew Kendrick | Collegian

Although relationships Hillsdale College has with employers and alumni can help students find internships and jobs, the Career Shift platform may help students to identify the type of job for which they are looking.

The career services office has three main platforms for helping students find jobs: Handshake, LinkedIn, and Career Shift. While the first two platforms help students find jobs through previous connections with employers and alumni students, Career Shift was added in 2015 to broaden the number of job opportunities.

“We would have no idea of knowing all the job postings that are out there, and so by using Career Shift, you can just search everything,” Assistant Director of Career Services John Quint said.

The downside to using Career Shift over other platforms is that it is somewhat of a “behemoth,” Quint said, in that it can pull job postings from anywhere on the Web. The positive side, however, is that the platform can help the student generate ideas, Student Affairs Mentor senior David Peters said.

“Especially for people who don’t know what they want, it gets the ideas flowing,” Peters said. “If you are an econ, business, or accounting major, the job market’s a little more friendly to you. But if you’re a history, art, more liberal arts major, it’s a very great tool, because it gets the ideas flowing…for those majors which don’t have cut-and-dry positions.”

Quint said the typical next step after searching Career Shift is to connect students to previously established networks through LinkedIn and Handshake.

Handshake is helpful in that, even though it provides a smaller pool of options, career services already has a relationship with the employers in the network so a student can often get a response from an employer within 24-48 hours, Quint said. LinkedIn also has thousands of contacts of alumni and provides the names of companies where they have worked.

“Eighty-five percent of jobs are filled via networking,” Quint said, referencing a February 2016 survey by The Adler Group.

Students can use Career Shift by logging in with their Hillsdale email account. Limiting searches to a particular city and job title can narrow the results, which can be saved in a folder. The job descriptions provide contact information for the company, which Director of Career Services Joanna Wiseley said has been helpful for some students.

Before making a phone call to a former Hillsdale student or a company employer, students can solicit help from career services in shaping their message.

“When people reach out, they are 10-fold more likely to get the job,” Quint said. “Most students do not take advantage of the networking side of things.”

Wiseley said she and the SAMs use Career Shift often in their appointments with students.

“We like it, because it’s so geographically diverse,” she said. “It’s a good way to open the door.”