Know who is eligible before the role is posted.
Career and placement management where student eligibility, employer records, roles, applications and offers sit on one record. The shortlist exists before the cycle opens, and every number you report has the records behind it.
The problem
The placement cell finds out who was eligible after the employer has gone.
An employer confirms a date. The team mails the cohort, collects resumes in a shared folder, checks eligibility against a marks sheet by hand, and builds a list overnight. Students who qualified never saw the notice. Students who did not qualify applied anyway. The recruiter waits, then asks a smaller institution for a longer list.
The same failures repeat. Eligibility is recomputed by hand every time, so the shortlist is late and inconsistent. The employer relationship lives in one person's contacts, so each cycle restarts it. And the outcome is collected at year end, so the placement figure is assembled from memory and email rather than read from a record.
What changes
Four outcomes, and the mechanism behind each one.
Placement is judged on how many students are placed, whether employers come back, whether the team can keep up, and whether the reported figure holds when someone checks it. The mechanism is named under each claim.
More students placed, because fit is known in advance.
Eligibility is read from the student record rather than recomputed by hand, and matching orders the cohort against the requirements of the role. The list is ready when the employer asks, and the students who qualify are the students who hear about it.
Employers come back, because the process respects their time.
An employer is a record rather than a contact in somebody's phone, with its own recruiters, its own history and its own roles. A recruiter sees their applicants and their statuses without waiting for the placement office to forward anything.
The placement team stops living in spreadsheets.
Roles open and close on dates you set, applications move through the statuses your institution defines, and each change is recorded with who made it. The season runs to a calendar rather than to whoever remembers to send the next email.
The number you report can be traced.
Offers, acceptances and declines are captured where the application already lives, so a placement figure is a view of records rather than a total assembled at year end. Reporting by programme, cohort or employer comes from the same source.
One record, eligibility to offer
A recruitment cycle, and what each stage fixes on the record.
The same six stages run for a single specialist role and for a full placement season. What matters is that each stage leaves something behind that reporting can read later.
Build the cohort picture
Profiles and resumes are completed against a central list of qualifications and skills, so eligibility is a fact rather than a guess.
Fixed hereWho is eligible, and whyBring the employer on
An employer record is created and verified, with named recruiters attached to that employer only.
Fixed hereWho the employer isPublish the role
A role carries its requirements and can be scheduled to open and close on set dates.
Fixed hereWhat was asked for, and whenMatch and shortlist
Students see roles they fit, recruiters see ranked candidates, and the team can put forward someone the rules would have missed.
Fixed hereWho was put forwardRun the process
Applications move through your own statuses, and every change keeps the person who made it and the time.
Fixed hereWhat happened at each stepRecord the outcome
Offers, acceptances and declines are captured on the application they belong to.
Fixed hereThe result, onceReporting is the by-product, not a separate exercise. Because each stage records its decision at the time, the placement figure at the end of the year is a query rather than a collection round.
What is in it
Six areas of capability.
Each one is described by the job it does. If you are building a requirements matrix, ask for the datasheet: it carries the full list, feature by feature, with configuration notes.
Student profiles and resumes
A profile complete enough to be matched, and documents kept current by the student rather than the office.
Employers and recruiter access
Employer records that outlive a relationship manager, with recruiters scoped to their own roles and applicants.
Roles and publishing windows
Roles described consistently and opened or closed on dates, so a season runs to a plan.
Matching and shortlisting
Rules your team sets, applied to the cohort, with room for the judgement call the rules would have missed.
Application workflow
The statuses your institution uses, with each change attributable to a person and a time.
Oversight and reporting
What the placement office, the dean and the employer each need to see, from one set of records.
Configuration, not code. Eligibility rules, matching weights, application statuses and role templates differ by institution and are set by your team. The full feature list lives in the datasheet rather than on this page, so ask for it during an evaluation and it comes with the configuration notes attached.
Where the figure comes from
Four questions behind every placement percentage.
A placement figure gets quoted in a prospectus, a ranking submission and a board paper. It is worth knowing whether the questions underneath it can still be answered when someone asks in March.
None of this decides what your institution should publish. It means that when a ranking body, an accreditor or a governing board asks how the number was arrived at, the answer is a set of records rather than a reconstruction.
Go deeper
From the Creatrix library.
Blogs, whitepapers and case studies for the people who run the cycle: career services teams, placement officers, employer relations and registrars.
Frequently asked
What placement teams ask first.
Does this replace our student information system?
No. The student record stays where it is, and eligibility is read from it. What this adds is the employer, role, application and offer information that a record system was never designed to hold.
Can recruiters work in it directly?
Yes. A recruiter is tied to their own employer, sees only their own roles and the applicants to them, and cannot see another employer's activity.
How does matching decide who is a fit?
On rules your team defines against qualifications and skills, with weights you set. A match score orders a shortlist; it does not make the decision, and the placement team can put forward a student the rules would have skipped.
Can we run structured recruitment windows?
Yes. Roles can be scheduled to open and close on set dates, so a placement season runs to a calendar rather than to whoever remembers to publish.
Can we report outcomes by programme and cohort?
Yes. Because offers and acceptances are captured on the same record as the application, reporting is a view of that data rather than a spreadsheet assembled at year end.
Can we run Career and Placement Management on its own?
Yes. It runs standalone, and it connects into the Academic Operating System when you are ready for the wider lifecycle.
BRING ONE RECRUITMENT CYCLE
Bring one cohort and one employer. We will run a cycle end to end.
A tailored proof session uses your eligibility rules, your application statuses and a role you recruit for, not a canned demo. Leave with a named, dated next step.