Employers Are the Audience Universities Forget

Show notes

Families ask whether employers rate your university, yet employers are one of the least actively managed audiences in higher education. I explain how to own that relationship and make it visible.

• Treat employers as a priority audience, with objectives, messages and measures.
• Create a clear front door for employer engagement, and coordinate who talks to whom.
• Measure employer perception in priority sectors and regions, then act on it.

Read the article: Employers are the audience universities forget

Full transcript

Hello, and welcome to Marketing Greats in Higher Education. I'm Jonathan Sabarre, your host, and this is where we explore the ideas shaping how universities are seen, chosen and trusted around the world. Everything I share on this show is my own personal view.

Ask a family what they want from a university and, sooner or later, the conversation turns to jobs. Will this degree lead somewhere? Do employers rate this institution? In many markets, those questions now outweigh almost everything else. Yet the people who can answer them, employers, are one of the least actively managed audiences in higher education!

Governments are asking the same questions, linking funding and regulation more closely to graduate outcomes. Global rankings include employer reputation and employment outcomes in their methodologies. Quietly, employers have become one of a university's most influential audiences. They shape what families believe, what policymakers reward and how institutions are compared. They deserve far more deliberate attention.

In most institutions, employer relationships sit in several places at once. The careers service works with graduate recruiters. Academics hold industry partnerships for research and placements. Business development pursues contracts. Alumni relations keeps in touch with graduates who now run companies. Each does valuable work, rarely as part of a coordinated reputation strategy. Meanwhile, marketing points at prospective students. Employers see the university through its graduates and research partnerships, but seldom through a deliberate, consistent story.

I see this from an unusual angle, because before higher education I spent years on the employer side of the table. As a senior marketer in hospitality, and a board executive on IHG's commercial marketing board for EMEA, I hired graduates, worked with universities on placements and formed impressions of which institutions produced people ready to contribute. As a recruiter, you remember the universities that made life easy, and the ones that didn't.

What strikes me now is how little those impressions had to do with anything the universities published. They came from individual graduates who impressed me, and university contacts who responded and made things happen. Employer reputation is earned one graduate and one interaction at a time. That's humbling, but encouraging, because it means it can be managed. It needs someone to own it.

Good practice starts with treating employers as a priority audience, with clear objectives, messages and measures alongside students and academics. Then coordinate the relationships. A shared view of who's talking to which employers prevents duplication and helps every conversation build on the last. Tell the outcomes story with evidence too: graduate success stories, employment data and employer partnerships that are visible, current and easy to find.

One piece of feedback I hear again and again is that universities are hard to work out. Too many doors, and no obvious one to knock on. Imagine a regional business that wants to offer a placement. It emails the careers team, gets passed to a faculty, then to a partnerships office, and somewhere along the way it gives up. A clear front door for employer engagement is a reputation investment in its own right.

Then bring employers into the university. Guest lectures, curriculum advisory boards, live projects and mentoring all strengthen relationships and give employers a genuine stake in your graduates' success. Track how they view your graduates and your institution. And measure employer perception properly in your priority sectors and regions, then act on what they tell you. Asking and then doing nothing is worse than never asking.

As the debate about the value of a degree intensifies, the institutions that can show convincingly that employers value their graduates will have a significant advantage. That case can't be made in a prospectus alone. It's made through a sustained relationship with the people who hire. Here's a test for vice-chancellors and governing bodies. Does your institution know what its top fifty employers think of it? If not, that's a gap worth closing this year!

Thank you for spending this time with me. If this episode sparked something for you, hit subscribe, so you never miss the next one. And our full season, with guests from leading universities around the world, is coming very soon. Head to Jonathan Sabarre dot com and sign up, so you're the first to know when it launches. Until next time, keep building something great.