GradLeaders Career Center FAQs

Get answers to some of the most frequently asked questions by career service professionals, deans, provosts, presidents, IT, and other school or professional association representatives looking to purchase and implement the GradLeaders Career Center platform. 

Q: Is the platform white-labeled? Can I feature my own brand, name, color, terminology, etc.?

A: Yes. GradLeaders Career Center is highly-customizable so that you can use your logo, colors and terminology plus also customize dashboards, screen messages, emails, text message reminders and more. Most of the time your student, alumni and employer users have no idea they’re even using a GradLeaders powered system. We want you to get all the credit for placing your students in their dream jobs so that your happy alumni give back!

Q: Is it customizable and configurable?

A: Yes. GradLeaders Career Center is the most robust, configurable and customizable career services management system in the market today. With over 850 settings and 1,847 permissions for the 795 pages in the system you can turn on/off specific modules and tweak modules to make the platform truly your own. Plus, GradLeaders Multi-Portal offering enables administrators from multiple offices, colleges, or departments to share one campus-wide career management system while providing end-users with a unique experience.

Q: Do I build/configure the system or is that done for me?

A: We build it for you. After signing a partnership agreement, your dedicated implementation manager will meet with you to discuss customization and configuration options so that they can build the system for you plus offer customized training.

Q: Can alumni use the platform also?

A: Yes, job-seeking alumni searching for jobs or career advice can use the platform too. There are even ways for alumni and current students to connect with each other through the system.

Q: Is the platform mobile-friendly and easy-to-use for my students, alumni and employers?

A: Yes, the GradLeaders Career Center platform offers mobile-first, responsively designed portals for your students, alumni and employers that's extremely easy-to-use but also includes in-app guided walkthroughs for users. Our extensive Interaction Design (IxD) of the job seeker and employer portals in 2017 focused on creating engaging, thoughtful and logical interfaces, based on our comprehensive review of more than 400 million clicks over the past decade. As a result, GradLeaders Career Center partners can give their students, alumni and employers access to a mobile version of their end-to-end services, anywhere, anytime. This fully responsive system automatically resizes for use on any mobile phone, tablet or computer so your users can quickly do what they need to do and easily find what matters to them.

Q: Do emails from the platform come from GradLeaders email addresses or our own?

A: Emails sent from GradLeaders Career Center come from the user’s unique email or a generic school email address, not GradLeaders. You can set different default email address for job board alerts, event alerts, co-op alerts, and more. You can even update the “from” email address on each individual email send.

Q: What’s the average email deliverability, open, and click-through rates?

A: Our team spent a lot of time getting our new email marketing platform within GradLeaders Career Center right before launching. We spent months testing, scrubbing email addresses, and warming up IP address to ensure the highest possible open, click-through, and delivery rates. And it paid off! Over the past 365 days there have been 27,607,172 emails sent through the system and our career center partners have had a 99.43% deliverability rate, 30% open rate and 3% click-thru rate (CTR).

Q: Do I need to pay for Handshake for students to get access to those jobs?

A: No. In August of 2019 Handshake decided to open it’s network to any undergraduate student with a “.edu” email address to “see personalized job recommendations, get messaged by employers about incredible opportunities, apply for jobs, read employer reviews, and receive career advice from other students.”

Q: Do you resell our student data?

A: No. But did you know that some career service software providers never delete and continue to use and sell your student and alumni data to 3rd parties even after you stop using their platform? GradLeaders vows to protect all our users and their private data. We understand your concerns with privacy and confidential data – and that is why we have always had a strict Privacy Policy and Terms of Use in place with each of our partner schools and employer customers. Additionally, students are given full control when determining how their information will be used and whether they’d like to participate in using the GradLeaders platform as an additional career service resource. GradLeaders also aims to protect our school partners by requiring students to affirmatively consent to the use of their data. GradLeaders complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) standards. Based on our agreement with universities and higher education institutions, a student’s information is only available to potential employers after the student signs up for GradLeaders and gives their consent. Once students join our platform, they can customize the settings of their profile according to their privacy preferences. Without a student’s permission, employers are unable to view such student’s detailed profile.

Q: Can I pull reports on engagement, outcomes and ROI?

A: Yes. GradLeaders not only offers 100s of robust canned reports but also at-a-glance metrics with data visualizations that make it even easier for career centers to access data and insights related to student engagement, employer engagement, job posting activity, communication tracking, advising appointment attendance, employment reporting and more! These reports can also be scheduled for email inbox deliveries on specific days/times so that you and other key stakeholders always have the latest and greatest data available to them.

Q: What is the student usage percentage or our partners?

A: Student usage varies per type of school or career center as well as with modules utilized. But our top schools who offer end-to-end career services and follow our best practices have 92% engagement rates at 4-year schools, 67% at 2-year schools, 73% at experiential learning programs, and 91% at graduate schools.

Q: Can you charge employers, students, and/or alumni within the platform?

A: Yes. You can charge for events and collect online payments from recruiters attending career fairs or other on-campus recruiting events then charge for additional attendees, WiFi, electricity and more. You can also charge for room reservations when employers submit recruiting requests or reserve an available room on campus. Some career centers even charge employers to post a job to your school-branded job board. Beyond employers, you can also charge students or alumni for career service workshops and collect online payments from students attending off-site meetings, dinner etiquette classes or other classes.

Q: Could a corporate partner/sponsor be featured within the platform?

A: Yes, in multiple ways! You can highlight corporate sponsor/partner profiles, jobs, internships, and events within the platform by adding custom widgets to the dashboards, creating quick searches for just their jobs, sending dedicated emails through the system, featuring their career website as a task in CareerTracker, or even adding their logo to the system header.

Q: Are you able to integrate any other software/systems within your platform?

A: Yes. We integrate with Twilio for web real-time communications but make it easy to use Zoom, Teams, or third-party solutions as well. GradLeaders Career Center also integrates with SurveyMonkey for surveys or evaluations. GradLeaders embeds Looker for real-time metrics and data visualization tools. We also offer single sign-on (SSO) authentication via CAS, LDAP or Shibboleth/SAML. We also offer calendar integration for Microsoft or Google. We also offer Salesforce CRM Integration. And with other open APIs specifically for advising appointments, calendar events, candidate notes, candidates, companies, recruiters, company events, job postings, resumes, rooms, workshops, and SSO it’s easy to integrate with other systems.

Q: What are your main differentiators from your competitors?

A: GradLeaders is more than just a robust, configurable, school-branded software provider. We help career centers create more meaningful connections between their students and employers to better guide them to their dream job. Our innovative career services and campus recruitment tools automate processes to give career development professionals and experiential learning programs more time to do what they love. Our network, data, and expertise helps career centers succeed and prove the value of their school’s degrees. Let us show you what customer service should look like!

Q: What are some of the unique features you offer?

A: GradLeaders Career Center includes multiple innovative features and industry-leading modules unique to GradLeaders, including: Amazon Alexa integration, CareerTracker, Experiential Learning Automation, Advising Blocks, OCI Bidding, Scorecard, Fully-embedded Live Video, Chat Channels, and more.

Q: How much does it cost?

A: GradLeaders offers modular pricing for every type of school and budget which allows you to build the right GradLeaders Career Center Platform for your unique career services needs. Just tell us about your needs and challenges and we can point towards a package and pricing uniquely for you. Stop paying for features and services you don't need! Get a custom platform built specifically for you!

Q: How long does it take to implement?

A: Building, customizing and learning to use GradLeaders Career Center can take anywhere from 6-12 weeks or longer based on your unique needs and requests. In general, we can go as fast or slow as you want, but your engagement in the process is critical to launching your custom platform to students, alumni and employers.

Q: Has Gradleaders undergone a SOC 1 or SOC 2 assessment?

A: GradLeaders has not. Our hosting company – Expedient has. This hosting environment is an enterprise-class facility monitored and protected by a team of experts. It offers increased security via a man trap with key-card and bio-metric hand scanner, single point of entry and exit. It also offers FE-25 fire prevention and thermal and particulate fire detection systems. Engineers are on-site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Q: Within the last 12 months, what is your solution uptime?

A: 99.914%. Our consolidated hosting environment, Expedient, is an enterprise-class facility monitored and protected by a team of experts. This hosting environment provides better uptime with predictive monitoring to identify problems before service is impacted and less downtime with multiple backup environments strategically located in risk-adverse regions including Columbus, Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Memphis and Pittsburgh.

Q: Is GradLeaders Career Center accessible? 

A: Yes, GradLeaders Career Center student and employer interface is compliant with Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards. For abled users, the accessibility enhancements in our application are not noticeable. For those using adaptive tools like screen readers, the enhancements will provide a better user experience. Accessibility compliance is the law — and it’s the right thing to do. At GradLeaders, we’re trying to remove barriers to using our application and reduce the risk of legal problems our partner schools may face by using technology that is not compliant.

Q: How are student and/or employer issues handled?

A: On-demand support is offered via in-app guided walkthroughs, downloadable PDF guides, and how-to videos but GradLeaders will never interface directly with your students or your employers. Those relationships are your own and we want to ensure you get the credit for making those connections, not us.

Q: How do you support career center partners? What is your service level agreement (SLA)?

A: With GradLeaders, you will not only have a dedicated Implementation Manager during initial setup but we also have a dedicated Support Team. Included in the Support Team is the next level of support provided by the Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). They will be available to work on more complex Support Requests including system site reviews, scheduled training, data integration/upgrade processes, configurations and other more advanced support. In addition to the Support Team, you also have a Customer Success Manager (CSM). The Customer Success Team is focused on strengthening the partnership and helping you get the most benefit and utility from GradLeaders products and services. If there are any questions about who to contact, start with the Support Team. They will make sure that your request is routed to the appropriate member of the GradLeaders team. There is also a dedicated email address and phone number to call for support. We offer Live Chat in-app plus in-app guided walkthroughs and other on-demand support resources as well. Contact us for the full SLA document.

Q: Is the data encrypted at rest? If so what is it encrypted on?

A: Currently only sensitive data such as passwords are encrypted at rest using Microsoft .NET security provider. However, we are transitioning to a new cloud platform early Summer 2021 that will encrypt all data at rest on all servers. This will be Expedient’s EEC platform.

Q: Who else is currently using this software?

A: Various schools, professional associations and career centers around the world use GradLeaders. No school or career center is too big or small to take advantage of the world’s leading career services management platform proven to maximize student engagement, increase office efficiency and drive employment outcomes. Various career development offices around the world have depended on GradLeaders including career centers at 4-year universities, 2-year community colleges, technical schools, experiential learning programs, coding academies, business schools, law schools, medical schools, other graduate schools, high schools and professional associations. Over the last year we had over 20,000 admin users at those career centers, 580,000 student and alumni users, and more than 120,000 employers used the platform. 

Q: Do you have any testimonials you can share?

A: Yes, multiple from all types of schools and career centers. Visit our website for the complete list or contact us for references.