The FSU Career Center changes the way employers find promising students

By Daniel Mutter

Originally published in the Apr/May 2010 issue of 850 Business Magazine

At the heart of the Florida State University campus sits a facility that connects employers to students graduating with degrees in a full range of professional fields. The Career Center, housed in the Dunlap Success Center, provides comprehensive services for students and employers across the globe.

By offering classes, walk-in counseling, mock-interview sessions, career fairs and an interactive online Web space, the center prepares FSU students to interview with some of the country’s leading employers. Students from all of the university’s colleges and departments are served by a combination of 46 graduate-student and full-time staff members who work at the facility.

“Right now, with the recession, we’ve been very active — probably a better word is proactive — in identifying employers that would like to participate in recruiting efforts here,” said Jeff Garis, who has been director of the Career Center for 18 years. As a member of the Florida Career Center Consortium — a group comprising the many public career centers across the state — the Career Center is able to do a lot of outreach to potential employers.

“We hold meetings off-site around the state at key employers and basically, collectively, will invite them to our respective campuses,” Garis said.

The centralized nature of FSU’s Career Center allows employers to access students in any discipline, from social work to engineering and every area of study in between. Each semester a number of career fairs, with Seminole Futures being the premier event, attract national and international companies such as BB&T, Lockheed Martin, Shell Oil Company and Ernst & Young LLP, that are seeking to hire students after graduation.

Ferguson Enterprises Inc., an international plumbing and building-supply company, has sent recruiters to Seminole Futures for more than 20 years.

“It is a good environment because the students feel comfortable there, but they’re also very well prepared because they are aware it’s an interview,” said Dayna Barrett, a sales associate with Ferguson. “I feel FSU students are well prepared to answer questions, and they also have really good-looking résumés. Just looking at that, I can tell that they prepare their students really well there.”

FSU alumnus Chris Guida got his start with Ferguson after attending Seminole Futures in 1998. He is now Ferguson’s branch manager in Tamarac, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale.

“Seminole Futures provides a great platform or avenue for students to (meet with) employers,” Guida said.

While the Career Center attracts employers from all over the country, it also helps local companies identify prospective employees.

“We are a Tallahassee-based accounting firm, so we have been going to Seminole Futures over the last 10 years for our main recruiting and staffing, and they have a great program,” said Debie Leonard, CPA, a tax partner with Thomas Howell Ferguson P.A. “The Career Center is awesome at communicating — telling us when the events are, what we need to do. They are just great and very easy to work with.”

To optimize its outreach, the Career Center has placed extensive resources on the Internet for employers to access. In 2002, the center developed its own “e-portfolio” software. The online career portfolio provides students with a personalized Web space to post their professional accomplishments in nearly all formats, including Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and even streaming video.

Four months after the development of the e-portfolio, the Career Center joined with five other universities to help pioneer the NACElink network. NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, is an organization that enables employers to list full-time, part-time and internship opportunities specifically geared to college students. Employers can post their jobs to an individual university free of charge or pay to be posted to multiple schools.

After FSU students submit a résumé to the system, it is reviewed by Career Center staff and then posted for viewing by potential employers worldwide. The network has now spread to more than 100 universities and utilizes FSU’s e-portfolio software. Known as SeminoleLink at FSU, it has become a very helpful tool in reaching out to local and national companies. While students can search for potential jobs, companies can access the résumé database to seek out students with particular interests or majors.

The Career Center operates by dividing services into four different units: Employer Relations Services, Career Advising, Career Experience Opportunities and the Center for the Study of Technology in Counseling and Career Development (the Tech Center).

The focus of Employer Relations Services is finding and offering full-time opportunities to graduating students and coordinating the center’s many career fairs, including engineering, public relations, part-time employment and Seminole Futures. Held twice a year at the Tallahassee-Leon County Civic Center, Seminole Futures brings in more than 100 different employers from across the country. Businesses seeking full-time employees can meet with students from a broad range of academic backgrounds.

After collecting résumés at Seminole Futures, employers can meet one on one with students and interview them for potential positions at the Career Center’s state-of-the-art interview facility. Covering an entire floor, the facility

offers employers 36 interview rooms. split into six pods of six for larger companies that may require an entire pod of interview rooms. Flat-screen TVs line the hallways, providing students with real-time information on the rooms, times and appointments scheduled by each interviewer. If employers can’t make it to Tallahassee during Seminole Futures, they can make an appointment to use the facility at another time.

Students can make an appointment or simply drop in to Career Advising and receive counseling from one of the many trained full-time or graduate-student staff members. Counselors guide students through extensive files on different careers; the files include information on the average pay, current demand, educational requirements and other important occupational facts. Counselors also provide access to a database filled with alumni who work in a variety of careers and are open to being contacted by students wishing to can gain insights from professionals working in their field of interest. Students also can receive feedback on their résumés, including the details sought by employers.

In addition to these in-house services, Career Advising also does a wide variety of outreach across campus.

“We do workshops on everything, including how to choose a major, how to get an internship, how to get a job, how to interview and how to write a résumé,” said Garis, the Career Center director.

Career Experience Opportunities, meanwhile, is specifically designed for students looking to find internships in their area of study. Part-time job assistance and mock interviews are also offered. To take advantage of the mock-interview services, students send in their résumés ahead of time so that counselors can best assess what sort of interview they are preparing for.

“We help interview students who want to pursue graduate and professional school as well; it’s not just about helping them to get jobs,” Garis said. In the mock-interview rooms, students are interviewed and videotaped so that counselors can later review the tapes with them to analyze their strengths and weaknesses and give them a better sense of what to prepare for when meeting with business executives.

In addition to counseling students and reaching out to potential employers, the Career Center also offers courses and conducts research. The Tech Center has its own faculty who teach undergraduate and graduate courses.

“We look a lot like an academic department, which is unique to a career center,” Garis said. “We teach classes for credit, we develop our own theories, we develop our own tests and assessments, and we actually have a national/international reputation for cutting-edge new services in career development.” Graduate students can receive a Master of Science degree in career counseling and often work as staff members at the center.

“One thing that FSU is known for is the comprehensive nature of our services,” Garis said “We do a lot of consulting around the country, and the world, for that matter. We have visitors almost all the time here from other countries. I’m going out to Stanford in two weeks to consult with them, and we’re proud that FSU gets asked to consult with universities like Stanford on developing their career services.”