Spotlight for Career Services Professionals

Kathy Mason, a university recruiter with Okta, attends every one of her organization’s information sessions. She often is trying to coordinate and confirm plans on the fly.

“At one point, I was on the road for 20 days at schools all along the east coast and in Canada,” Mason says. “I was trying to manage locations and rooms for our information sessions, and make sure that everything is set and ready to go.”

Support from career centers is crucial to Mason and other recruiters trying to organize and conduct effective information sessions on your campus. How can you help?

“The more and better detailed communication, the better,” Mason says. “Confirmation e-mails from career services offices are extremely helpful. Here's your room, here's where you'll be located, here are directions, those types of things. Also, providing a list of students who have RSVP’d for the information session is great because we can send out information to them before or after the session if we want to.”

Another boost to employer efforts is for career centers to send the names and contact information for leaders of student organizations and associate deans of programs that are specific to the type of organization and industry that is presenting. This way, these campus leaders can let their members and students know about the session.

For example, if a company is recruiting software engineers, it wants to get in front of computer science majors.

“If we’ve got information on STEM clubs,” Mason explains, “we can reach out to those clubs to make sure we get even more students—especially those who would be interested in our organization and jobs—to attend the information session.”

She says that ensuring employer information sessions are successful takes work both on and off campus.

Says Mason: “It’s a combination of efforts by the employer and by career services to get the word out so the employer not only has great attendance, but the students who do attend are interested in our industry or, even better, in our organization.”