Employer relations teams live and die by one question: which companies should we be talking to, and why? Steppingblocks Graduate Insights answers that question with your own alumni outcomes data. With Graduate Insights you can learn who's hiring your graduates, how those relationships are trending, and how well your talent pipeline already matches what employers need. This article walks through the features employer relations and career services teams rely on most when prioritizing outreach, planning events, and building the case for new employer partnerships.
Find your institution's top current employers
The Overview tab in Graduate Outcomes shows the employers with the largest number of alumni working for them right now.
Use this view to:
Confirm which employers already have a large alumni presence before reaching out
Prioritize check-in visits with your most established employer relationships
Identify employers worth inviting into advisory boards or curriculum conversations
Ground employer-facing conversations in real headcount numbers, not anecdotes
Spot employer trends before they show up anywhere else
The Employer Trends tab goes a level deeper by showing hiring patterns over the past 10 years, sorted three ways: Volume, Trending Up, and Trending Down.
Volume lists the employers that have hired the most alumni over the past decade (the current year is excluded so a partial year doesn't skew the ranking).
Trending Up surfaces employers who are hiring a growing share of your alumni. These companies could be strong candidates for expanded career fair participation, more info sessions, or a dedicated recruiting pipeline.
Trending Down flags relationships that are cooling off, so your team can reach out and understand why before the relationship fades entirely.
Benchmark your alumni against a target employer's skill needs
Before walking into a meeting with a new or prospective employer partner, use Employer Benchmarking to compare that company's in-demand skills against the skills your alumni actually have. This turns a cold pitch into a data-backed one: you can show up already knowing how well-matched your graduates are, and where there might be gaps worth addressing.
This is especially useful for:
Preparing talking points ahead of a first meeting with a prospective employer
Identifying skill gaps to flag to academic departments before pursuing a new partnership
Strengthening renewal conversations with employers who've scaled back hiring
Find alumni already working at a target company
Once you know which employers to prioritize, Graduate Explorer helps you find the people. Use the View & Filter tab to narrow alumni by employer, college, degree level, graduation year, and location, then drill into individual profiles under Graduate Data.
Employer relations teams typically use this to:
Identify alumni ambassadors for info sessions, panels, or employer-hosted events
Make warm introductions between career services and hiring managers at target companies
Build a short list of contacts before attending a recruiting event or conference
Pull a filtered list of alumni at a specific employer to share with faculty or program leads
Make the case for new outreach and events
Combine employer, location, industry, and salary data to prioritize where to send staff, which companies to invite to career fairs, and where to expand employer programming. Career services teams also use this data in board reports, employer index updates, and conversations with academic leadership about where student demand and employer demand actually overlap.