How to Optimize Candid Career+,
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Phase 1 Familiarize yourself with your new Candid Career+ platform

We estimate this section can be completed in 30 minutes or less

First thing’s first: Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the more modern and expansive Candid Career+ platform. Things are going to look and feel a bit different than the legacy version, but you’ll quickly see how the new modern interface and improved user experience will make engaging students in career exploration so much more easier.

• Watch this short overview video that provides a walkthrough of Candid Career+
• Access your new Candid Career+ platform using your legacy URL, which will redirect you to your new platform. From there you can log-in using your email address and password (you can reset your password if needed). Upon logging in for the first time you’ll also be able to view an in-product tour!
• Add new administrative users: Each admin user will have their own unique profile and log-in credentials, making it easy for your full-time staff, student staff, even your colleagues and partners across campus to publish videos, create playlists, and more.
  • User level permissions overview Knowledge Base article
  • Add Users Knowledge Base article

Phase 2 Publish Videos

We estimate this section can be completed in one hour or less.

Now that you’re familiar with your new platform, publishing videos will be the single most important element in your usage and optimization Candid Career+. As a reminder, we’ve sourced several new content providers that have added hundreds of new and fresh videos to the library that address new industries and topics!

Below we’ve outlined steps to publish the new video content you have at your fingertips, brand your office as an authority on career development, and ensure students and key stakeholders can easily access the video content they want and need.

2A: Review the organizational structure of your platform

Students and other key stakeholders want to see content that’s most relevant to them based on their interests or goals. To support this, we’ve set up your new platform with default recommended “Communities.” You’ll see those as “Industries,” “Identities/Affinities,” and “Get Hired” topics. This will make it easy for students and other visitors to more quickly and easily find the videos that appeal to them. Additionally, you also have the option to create and add additional Communities within your platform that align with industries, academic departments, student/stakeholder groups, or even topics.

• Review the default communities and update the naming conventions if needed:
  • Understand what Communities are Knowledge Base article
  • Customize existing Communities Knowledge Base article

Takeaway tasks

• Create communities based on the student populations you serve, common topics of interest, academic areas, etc. You’ll be able to tag and publish videos to these spaces. Again, this is optional, and you can add new Communities over time.
  • How to add new Communities Knowledge Base article
• Update your menu to reflect your new Communities
  • How to add menu items to your front page Knowledge Base article
  • How to update your Industries of Affinities / Identities landing page Video

2B: Tag and publish content

One of the most exciting updates to Candid Career+ is that we’ve sourced several new content partners that are providing tons of fresh video content that you can now make available to your students! You can view all video providers as well as individual videos within the Candid Career+ dashboard. From there, you can tag and publish content to be easily accessible in different areas of your platform.

• Tag and publish video content that you want to fill your Communities 
  • How to tag and publish content Video
  • How to post videos from the external video library Knowledge Base article
  • How to tag videos Knowledge Base article
  • How to reorder your video content Knowledge Base article
  • Improve user exploration with content categories Knowledge Base article

You also have the option to create custom playlists, which will make it easy for your campus partners, including faculty, staff, and other stakeholders, to share videos with students in their daily interactions and even embed career videos into the classroom or advising experience.

• Create playlists 
  • Create and manage playlists Knowledge Base article
  • Embed Candid Career+ videos throughout the rest of your website and on other department pages Knowledge Base article

2C: Begin tracking analytics

Familiarize yourself with the new analytics that track user sessions, page views, and total engagement – proving ROI and utilization of key resources. You’ll be able to track engagement over time so you can see benchmark insights for your platform, set goals, and see how promotional efforts can impact usage of CC+ in realtime. Engagement analytics will also provide you with deeper insight into industries or topics that students are engaging with the most, which can be used to inform other areas of your strategy.

• Familiarize yourself with the engagement analytics Knowledge Base article

Phase 3 Customize the look and feel of your platform

To optimize usage, it’s important that students and other stakeholders are engaging with a brand that they know and trust, one that’s familiar and credible. Your new CC+ platform can now be customized to have your institution’s foundational brand elements and styling applied (logos, colors, fonts, and even the URL) which will ensure all users know the resource is provided by your career office. The ultimate result is a stronger digital presence for your career office to further solidify your team as thought leaders on career development on your campus, and a more seamless digital experience, decreased bounce rates, and increases in repeat visitors.

Branding & Configuration

There are several brand elements that can be updated within your platform that will further make it look and feel like an extension of your office, including:

• Replacing your institution’s logo with a logo for your career office
• Removing the Candid Career+ logo from the page header
• Customizing your platform URL to convey this as a space to engage with content and resources from career services (i.e. careerexploration.school.edu)
• Updating the colors and fonts to match institutional brand guidelines

Each element is completely optional and you have control over which parts you want to update! The best part is that our uConnect team makes all of the branding-related changes for you! All you need to do is submit your branding changes using this form:

• Candid Career+ Branding Form Form

Customize the Interface

Optional: You can further customize your platform to have it reflect your team, your office, and the services you provide:

• Customize your front page Knowledge Base article
• Add a new front page banner image Knowledge Base article
• Update your menu with what’s most relevant to your audience Knowledge Base article
• Create a staff page to feature your staff Knowledge Base article
• Add profiles to your staff page Knowledge Base article

Phase 4 (optional) Recruit a donor or employer sponsor

As part of launching / expanding your office’s digital presence, consider donors or employer sponsors to be prominently featured in the launch. This approach is a nice complement to sponsorship opportunities at physical events, and your partners would benefit from 24×7 visibility and branding to students and all stakeholders. Career leaders leveraging the platform to either launch, or expand their sponsorship program have been able to generate additional revenue for their center through this approach. Recruit a single headline donor or use our templates to launch an employer sponsor program–all right within your CC+ platform!

• New Sponsorship Program Patterns Video walkthrough
• How Spelman launched and scaled their digital sponsorship program with their virtual career center Case study
• The Digital Corporate Sponsorship Playbook Article

Want some guidance or advice on how to get started? Join the Career Everywhere Community or ask for introductions of career leaders who have been successful in growing digital sponsorship programs.

Phase 5 Engage your students

We estimate this section can be completed in one hour or less.

Now that your platform reflects your brand and office, you’re ready to promote the new and improved resource to your students!

5A: Sending email communications through CC+

Did you know Candid Career+ has a student communication tools built right into the back-end dashboard – including a brand new email marketing suite? You can now send automated recommendations of content to your students (and campus partners) over email that prominently feature career videos that are of interest to them. 

When users receive emails with content that feels tailored for them, they’re more likely to engage with your communications. Our automated alerts can either be activated for only students who opt-in themselves, or you can subscribe students to receive these messages based on what you know of their interests. 

Emails sent using this technology have a 49% average open rate, 13% higher than the national average open rate of 36%.

Here are some steps you can take to begin using the email marketing suite and automate personalized outreach to students and stakeholders over email:

• Develop and manage your outreach lists
  • Add subscribers to your platform Knowledge Base article
  • Encourage users to subscribe to your platform Knowledge Base article
• Use the email builder functionality to promote and recommend videos and playlists for students via email communications
  • Edit your “From” name and email address for the email tool Submit a form request
  • Enable SSO Submit a form request
  • How to build and send a custom email Knowledge Base article
  • Utilize email templates for communicating with students CC+ Marketing Toolkit
• Ensure students are automatically signed up to receive notifications of new videos that match their interests
  • How to turn on automated alerts Knowledge Base article
  • Encourage students to customize their alerts Knowledge Base article

5B: Review other opportunities for promoting Candid Career+ directly to students

• Connect and educate student ambassadors & peer advisors CC+ Marketing Toolkit
• Embed Candid Career+ videos on other areas of your website (both your career services website and others across the institution) Knowledge Base article

Phase 6 Promote to faculty & key campus partners

It’s important to maximize your reach by ensuring your colleagues across campus are aware of your video library. Doing so will not only help to educate the campus community around the important work of career services, but it will equip faculty, staff, advisors, and others to share these videos with students and evangelize the library in their organic, daily interactions.

If you’ve created Communities within your platform to align with specific academic areas of interest and student populations on campus you’ll be able to promote those specific Communities to faculty and staff that represent those areas, so they can easily reference the content themselves and share with the students they support every day.

Here are some steps to be sure to take in your pursuit of engaging faculty, staff, and other key stakeholders:

• Create Communities within your platform to align with academic areas of interest, topics, etc. (if you haven’t done so already!) [See Phase 2]
• Import faculty and staff emails from your CRM so you can easily communicate with them via email just as you would with students [See Phase 5]
• Encourage faculty/staff to share video content in course curriculum and on other departmental pages by embedding career videos into the classroom Knowledge Base article
• Create a playlist request form to share with faculty so they can request a custom playlist from your team that they can use
• Encourage them to sign up for alerts so they can receive notifications of new videos published that are relevant to their academic area

Other resources

• 5 Ways to Engage Faculty with Career Services Career Everywhere article
• How UConn Built a Career Champion Program With 500+ Champions Career Everywhere case study
• 3 Ways to Make Career Services Everybody’s Business Career Everywhere podcast

But remember, we’re constantly adding new videos from several of our content partners, and you’ll want to keep tabs on usage analytics as they’ll be updated in real time. We recommend that logging in to your CC+ platform becomes a regular part of your week as we’re confident you’ll continue to find new ways to get value.

If you followed the steps above, especially customizing the branding and replacing the Candid Career+ logo with your office’s logo, you can start to see how this could evolve into your office’s very own virtual career center.  Doing so can facilitate deeper (self-guided) career exploration for students, and more meaningful engagement with the full range of career resources you and your team offer.

Now that you’ve created a strong virtual presence with your Candid Career+ platform, you’re well-positioned to continue on the path of truly making it a one-stop-shop for all of your career content, resources, tools, and information. As a reminder, because Candid Career+ is a part of the uConnect technology infrastructure, you can efficiently transform it into a full-fledged virtual career center (the same one these 200+ career centers use). By customizing the branding, and continuing to consolidate your resources into the platform, you can position it as a virtual career center, and an extension of your current career center website. The result will be a simplified user experience for students and campus partners, and significant increases in visibility, awareness and engagement with all of your resources (listen to how another career leader describes it). A virtual career center serves as virtual version of your physical career center and enables you to:

• Establish a modern digital brand for your office
• Consolidate resources into one place
• Provide equitable access to all students
• Capture engagement analytics of all resources
• Facilitate visibility into career services for faculty, staff, prospects, parents, and other stakeholders
• Scale the work and impact of your team

In this section of the guide we’ll provide recommendations for integrating your other career resources and making it easy for your students to extend their career exploration experience. Every option listed can easily and quickly be added to your platform and can also be offered as a free trial if you’d like to test it out.

If you’d like to learn more, reach out to your CC+ Platform Specialist, Alyssa Petersen.

Phase 7 Integrate Key Resources

Many career services teams provide resources to their students that they would consider to be “table stakes.” These often include jobs/internship opportunities, upcoming events, and important internal resources like resume guides, interview checklists and more. Integrate these resources into your platform to ensure they are easy to find for students and the whole campus community.

Phase 8 Integrate & consolidate tools and technologies

According to a recent survey, 45% of career centers offer 5 or more career tools/technologies to support their students, yet only 2% of teams describe engagement with their offices and resources as “great.” We find that the most common challenge related to engagement with resources is due to a fragmented user experience. Different resources are housed in different places on your site and content for each one typically lives behind a log-in. We’re excited to help Candid Career+ customers leverage their platform to create a virtual career center and consolidate all their  resources into a single space to promote utilization, measure usage, and increase visibility.

Phase 9 Inform & Inspire Your Students’ Pathways with Career Data

Add robust data to your platform to provide critical insights into different career pathways.

Phase 10 Increase support for all student populations

Leverage best-in-class resources and provide nuanced support for students with different identities, circumstances, and interests.

Other helpful resources

• uConnect virtual career center client directory
• Virtual career center 8-minute demo Video walkthrough
• 7 Ways to Implement Career Everywhere Career Everywhere article
• uConnect Knowledge Base
• Candid Career+ user channel (within the Career Everywhere user community) Career Everywhere
• Career Everywhere Resources Hub Career Everywhere
• Career Everywhere Podcast Career Everywhere
• Schedule time with your Candid Career+ Platform Specialist