The Office of Career Services launched a new job and internship recruitment website in August, bringing about a significant increase in student connections to potential employers as compared to the previous website.
Career Services will hold a ribbon-cutting event for the new site Nov. 10, which will include education sessions on how to use the new site.
ICHired is a website that offers a platform for employers to recruit students, graduates, alumni, faculty and staff for jobs and internships. The new website was launched Aug. 1 through Handshake, a career services management platform.
Before the college partnered with Handshake, a similar service called eRecruiting was offered by a company named Experience. Over the past five years, eRecruiting had offered an average of 2,700 jobs a year, according to Career Services. In its first two months of operation, ICHired posted 1,957 jobs and internships, said John Bradac, director of Career Services. Bradac said the office receives new postings every day. Out of those jobs, 800 of them have been filled. ICHired is also open to faculty and staff, whereas eRecruiting was not.
After a partnership of about five years, the office was informed that Experience had gone bankrupt, Bradac said, and Career Services was left without a company to help relaunch its recruiting program. John Fracchia, associate director of Career Services, offered and organized a plan to partner with Handshake as a solution, Bradac said.
Bradac said the event is meant to be a strong introduction to the website and a celebration of the activity around it.
Career Services works with 6,000 different employers, Bradac said. Jobs can be located anywhere from New York City to Spain, Germany and France. They are also open to all majors, Bradac said, although the School of Business has used the new program the most.
The New England Aquarium has multiple internship postings on ICHired, including positions in marketing, research and conservation. Brendon Dempsey, intern coordinator at the New England Aquarium, said the aquarium hires 65–70 interns each summer and receives around 450 applications for those positions. He said sites like ICHired make the process of reaching out to students much easier, and that most of their student recruitment comes through such college websites.
“In most cases, the schools that have these [sites] are the ones that we’re really able to get our messages out to,” Dempsey said. “If we’re going to do it at other schools, it has to be through professors, and that’s very tricky to do.”
Senior Hannah Biehn said she has only used the website once at a professor’s recommendation and did not find the site helpful.
Junior Rhiannon Doherty said her experience was different.
“ICHired was helpful for me when looking for internships,” Doherty said. “I was able to target my desired area of study and specify on what city/state I wanted to work in.”
In order for job listings to be posted by Career Services, the listings are either emailed or mailed to the office, or they can be posted on Handshake. The office screens each company and their postings.
In order for students to gain access to the software, they sign in with their Netpass username and password. Bradac described ICHired as a “user-friendly, easy-to-use” website, which is exactly what he and his colleagues were looking for.
Bradac said Career Services expects about 7,500 job and internship postings by July 31, 2016.
Faith Meckley contributed reporting to this article.
