The standard narrative about the career services problem focuses on students: students aren't showing up, students aren't prepared, students don't know how to apply.
That's only half the story.
Kevin Prentiss, Head of Product and Technology at the NSLS, identified the other half in the State of Higher Ed webinar, explaining how employers are struggling too. They want to hire strong entry-level candidates. They're willing to pay for them. The problem is that the institutional pipeline isn't helping them find the ones worth hiring.
Prentiss put it plainly: the willingness to pay for high-quality interns is there, but discerning that quality from what career services currently produces is the hard part.
That statement reframes the career services activation problem entirely. The gap isn't just between students and job readiness. It's between career services offices and their potential to function as genuine talent pipelines. And most of them aren't delivering on that potential for either side of the marketplace.
Why Resume Volume Doesn't Work
The current dominant model for institutional career services goes like this: employers post jobs, students apply, career services helps students with their resumes and maybe hosts a career fair. The institution's role is primarily logistics: connecting students who want work with employers who have listings.
This model has a fundamental flaw: it does nothing to help employers discern candidate quality. Employers screening a stack of resumes from a career fair are looking for signals that the resume format mostly obscures. GPA reflects academic performance but not professional readiness. Listed skills and experiences describe what candidates have done but not what they can do. The screening signals employers rely on (school prestige, major, GPA) are blunt instruments that miss excellent candidates and surface mediocre ones in roughly equal measure.
According to the 2026 State of Higher Ed Report, only 22.2% of recruiters believe the degree alone justifies its cost. That's not a statement about the degree's value in the abstract; it's a statement about how poorly the current system communicates what the degree has actually produced in a given candidate.
Employers who are sophisticated enough to know what they're looking for, communication competency, critical thinking, professional judgment, can't find those qualities in a resume stack. The career services model that produces resume stacks is not solving their problem.
What a Pipeline That Works Actually Looks Like
The model that produces more value for both students and employers looks different from the current one in several key ways. Career services that documents competency rather than just listing credentials, working with students to identify and develop their professional capabilities, produces candidates who can demonstrate specific skills rather than simply list job titles and GPA. Employers who can evaluate demonstrated competency make better hiring decisions faster.
Institutions that consistently place students in strong positions don't just post listings; they build active, ongoing relationships with employer partners who know what the institution's students are like, what they can do, and what they've been prepared for. Those relationships produce targeted opportunities that never get posted to general job boards.
Amy Everson, Senior Director of University Recognition and Institutional Events at the American Public University System, identified skills language coaching as the highest-value intervention career services can provide in the State of Higher Ed webinar: teaching students to describe their competencies in the language employers use. Students who can articulate what they've learned in terms of transferable professional skills are dramatically easier for employers to evaluate.
Earlier and more sustained engagement matters too. Employers who partner with institutions that introduce career services in the first year get candidates who have been developing professionally for four years, not four months. That depth of preparation is visible, and it commands different employer attention than the rushed senior-year pipeline most institutions produce.
The Two-Sided Marketplace Problem
Prentiss's framing of the career services problem as a two-sided marketplace failure is worth unpacking because it suggests a different institutional model.
A two-sided marketplace needs to create value for both sides to function. Career services, in its current form, is trying to create value for students (job access, resume help, interview prep) without adequately creating value for employers (quality candidate identification, efficient screening, reliable preparation signals). An employer who has to screen hundreds of resumes to find three candidates worth interviewing is not experiencing value from the institutional career services relationship. They're experiencing friction.
The institutions that build genuine pipelines invest in both sides of the marketplace. They develop students' professional capabilities and communication skills so that employer partners can trust the preparation signal. They maintain active employer relationships so that students have access to opportunities beyond what's publicly posted. And they build matching systems, advising, employer outreach, targeted recommendations, that connect specific students to specific opportunities rather than broadcasting opportunities to everyone.
This model requires more institutional investment than logistics and listings. It also produces dramatically better outcomes for students, employers, and the institution.
What Career Services Can Do This Year
The transition from a logistics-and-listings model to a genuine talent pipeline doesn't happen overnight, but there are specific actions career services offices can take within existing capacity.
Reframing advising conversations around competency, shifting from "what jobs are you applying for?" to "what competencies have you developed, and how do you describe them in professional language?", produces a more valuable outcome than a formatted resume. Building one or two deep employer relationships matters more than accumulating dozens of shallow ones; the value of a relationship where the career services team knows what the employer is looking for and the employer trusts the pipeline exceeds broad but thin employer outreach.
Creating skills language resources, a library of frameworks for translating common student experiences into employer-recognized competencies, gives students a starting point for professional communication without requiring individual coaching at scale. And tracking and communicating outcomes gives both sides a reason to invest further: employer partners who can see placement rates and internship performance have a reason to deepen the relationship, and students who can see the same data have a reason to engage earlier.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't employers just develop better screening tools instead of relying on career services?
Many are trying to. Competency-based assessments, structured interview formats, and skills-verification tools are all being developed. But institutional career services that produce well-prepared candidates with strong professional communication skills still command employer attention because they reduce screening friction regardless of what tools employers use.
What do employers actually want from institutional career services partnerships?
Primarily, confidence that referred candidates are prepared. Employers who trust that an institution's career services has genuinely developed students professionally will prioritize those candidates in their screening. That trust is built through consistent delivery: students who can do what they say they can do.
How should career services offices prioritize when resources are limited?
Prioritize depth over breadth: one deep employer relationship is worth more than ten shallow ones, and intensive engagement with a smaller cohort of students produces better outcomes than light-touch support for everyone. The institutions that deliver consistently good outcomes from focused effort differentiate more than the ones that try to support everyone minimally.
What role can alumni play in building the employer pipeline?
Significant. Alumni who are now in hiring positions represent the most credible endorsers of their alma mater's career services quality, and the most direct access to opportunities for current students. Career services offices that build structured alumni engagement programs, not just networking events, can develop the two-sided marketplace function through their existing alumni base.
The career services problem is not primarily a student problem or an employer problem. It's a system design problem. The current system wasn't built to function as a talent pipeline; it was built as a logistics layer. Rebuilding it as a genuine marketplace requires investment, intentionality, and a different model. For the full data on career services, employer expectations, and what drives student career readiness, read the 2026 State of Higher Ed Report.
