If our students leave business school and can’t find decent work, that’s not their failure. That’s ours.
We love to talk about employability. Career readiness. Global networks. But under the hood? Most career services are still running workshops on how to write a cover letter. Seriously. In 2025. As if hiring managers are dying to open another Word doc.
Too many schools are still operating like it’s 2005: upload a few job offers to a clunky internal portal, host a semi-annual “career day” with booths and branded pens, and call it a career strategy. Meanwhile, the world of work has mutated. Traditional pathways are vanishing. The value of a diploma is under attack. And networks, those glossy alumni brochures we love to flash, have mostly become LinkedIn wishful thinking.
Here’s the doping-in-cycling level secret: companies barely look at CVs anymore. They’re sorted, scored, and filtered by ATS (now powered by AI) before a human even clicks. And most of the students know it. We just pretend not to.
The “student-as-client” dilemma is an old one. But here’s what’s new: clients are getting smarter. They can smell performative career services a mile away. And they’re right to question the ROI.
What do most schools offer? Career offices run by people who—let’s be honest—haven’t looked for a job in ten years. Hiring advice from HR reps who never actually hire. And job boards full of expired listings.
And in class? Faculty still teaching for theoretical futures, instead of the messy, fragmented reality students actually face—freelance gigs, portfolio careers, side hustles, hybrid paths.
We can, and must, do better.
First, plug faculty into the hiring market. Not just “invite a guest speaker” level plugged in, but actively co-designing projects with employers, scouting internship gaps, and being part of the post-grad job conversation. I do this in some of my courses. One founder came in, loved the pitch, and offered two jobs on the spot. No CV. No gatekeeping. No waiting. Just results.
Second, bring in students who just finished job hunting (did this too last semester). They know the terrain. Let them lead the next career workshop. Or better yet, bring in managers—people who actually hire, not just shuffle CVs.
Third, school’s should partner with recruiting startups that are actually innovating like Talendary, Hirevue, Beamery, or my fav Handshake. Some are blockchain-based (Hirechain & LaborX), if anything, that’s going to shake things up. What’s important, they’re rethinking job discovery, not clinging to outdated funnels.
I run job search clinics every year. Off the clock. Out of the syllabus. Unpaid. And still, 20% of my students show up. We treat the job hunt like sales, because it is. We cover the “job funnel,” objection handling, self-positioning, follow-up strategy. I help them build live portfolio sites with no-code tools that showcase real work, including what they’ve built in class btw. It's what employers look at anyway. Not the bullet points on some templated CV.
And I publish everything I find, modern job-tracking tools ( like Simplify, Teal or my personal fav Huntr), up-to-date hiring platforms, cutting-edge tactics, on my shared Notion class site. Constantly updated. Students use it. Because it works.
That’s the kind of hiring pipeline we should be building.
If we don’t fix this, nothing else matters. Not the rankings. Not the campus. Not the accreditations. Because if our students don’t get work, the rest is noise.