How might we build employer partnerships that create career opportunities while establishing Calbright as a credible institution worth partnering with?
The Problem
Employers in California had no clear, consistent way to connect with Calbright and reach its students.
Without an employer experience, Calbright risked missing partnership opportunities and limiting career outcomes for students.
Research and Discovery
Over the first month, I combined competitor analysis, employer discovery calls, and internal team interviews to ground the strategy since we were starting from scratch.
Competitor Analysis
I looked at two schools with very different employer programs: a fully-online university and a more traditional, prestigious university. The online school actively marketed the types of achievements their students had while the latter had almost no content about their students and trusted their brand value, directly funneling to recruiting or partnerships. Calbright, currently without name recognition or an alumni network to lean on, pushed me toward building an outreach framework highlighting our students and academic programs.
Internal Team Interviews
Interviews with external-facing colleagues revealed that teams were operating in silos, with no shared visibility into who was talking or working with whom. It became clear that we needed a shared CRM, which led to the HubSpot implementation covered in Results.
Following, this actually revealed a third problem: Internal teams had no way to track and share outreach efforts or partnership progress to avoid duplicate efforts and leverage existing relationships.
Employer Discovery Calls
Within our month-long research window, we set up 12 calls with California employers across industries related to our academic programs to understand their hiring needs and how they currently viewed community college talent.
After the calls, I led an affinity mapping session with the team, grouping insights into six topic areas: hiring needs, current practices, engagement preferences, perception of Calbright, barriers, and opportunities.
Two findings stood out: Employers were largely unfamiliar with our certificates as credentials, so we couldn't assume those qualifications carried enough weight alone. Larger companies tended to have rigid requirements, like hiring only from four-year programs or specific class years, that we had no way to work around as an asynchronous, competency-based college. That pointed us toward small to medium-sized businesses, who had more flexibility and an assumption of more to gain from a wider talent pool.
Design
I utilized our research findings to inform three artifacts: personas, a journey map, and an employer flow. Each one visualized a part of the employer experience for the team to build a shared understanding and find where to focus.
Persona Development
I built three personas to represent types of companies that might recruit from a community college. In practice, this helped us identify a strong first contact at each one.
Journey Map
I mapped the employer journey across five stages, capturing The Overshadowed HR Manager's thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Early on, we put most of our attention on Conversion. As a new college with no existing employer relationships, getting employers to commit to a partnership felt like the biggest hurdle. Once we started outreach, it turned out this was wrong. Consideration was the hard part to get any response to cold outreach at all. Once an employer was in a conversation with us, finding a way to partner and collaborate was rarely the problem.
Employer Flow
The employer flow mapped the ideal path from first outreach to an active partnership, showing the decision points along the way. I also purposefully left off an actual "finish line." Once a new partner committed to one type of engagement, whether posting jobs, hosting an info session, or bringing someone for a panel, the relationship fed back to the middle to work toward another engagement.
As part of building the flow, I developed a full menu of services defining how employers could work with us. In theory, it would simplify partnerships by giving employers a clear set of options upfront. In practice, it felt transactional and less relationship-focused, which was a top goal of ours. I made the decision to scrap the menu of services and shifted to introducing options conversationally based on what each employer actually needed, which was especially helpful with employers who were still figuring out whether Calbright was a fit at all. This helped partnerships to feel individualized and I was told this was seen and meaningful to the folks I worked with.
HubSpot Implementation Project
In the middle of this design process, I supported a newly-created tiger team to bring HubSpot as a shared management system to all external-facing teams. I worked on this project in parallel to this design work, creating onboarding and training documents, setting up our personalized HubSpot platform, and actively using it to test.
Results
Within six months of putting the strategy into practice, Calbright had a repeatable way to reach employers, high-engagement student events, and a shared system to manage.
Partnerships
From February 2025 onward, I used the strategy to guide all employer outreach. We contacted over 280 employers and achieved a 10%+ response rate. Of those who responded, we generated more than 20 active partners who were posting jobs, joining speaker panels, and hosting unique events with us. The mix skewed toward small to medium businesses, which aligned with our research, with staffing agencies as the second most common partner type.
Events
Employer-supported student events were consistently one of Calbright's most popular touchpoints, drawing the largest attendance and engagement numbers compared to in-house programs. Post-event surveys showed 90%+ satisfaction across various likert scale questions and drawing audiences of up to 300 students for a single event.
Systems
HubSpot was fully adopted across all five teams and remains active. I became a power user to support adoption and change management. This was a big shift giving everyone shared visibility into employer relationships, which required trust and robust note-taking, but was well adopted and highly utilized off the bat.
Reflection
Looking back, I should have found a way to keep employers involved through more steps of the process. Discovery calls gave us initial direction, but once we moved into building the strategy and the flow, we were working off early insights without continuous feedback from employers.
Keeping engagement opportunities flexible was the right call for Calbright, at least at the beginning when we were trying to build our first relationships. An open-ended approach comes off warm and tailored, but can be harder to scale than a more standardized process. I think the menu of services is still meaningful and should be introduced in the future to help scalability. The next challenge would be balancing scalability with staying true to the warmth and effort that we were praised for from partners.
Next Steps
Design for first impressions. Getting an initial response to cold outreach was the hardest part of implementation. It would be beneficial to A/B test what emphasis earns the highest response rates and if it depends on the type of employer. After initial meetings, we converted over 50% into student engagement opportunities within two months.
Tie engagement to student outcomes. The current metrics measure employer activity and student engagement, but the real goal is jobs for students. Connecting partnerships to actual hire numbers would measure employer relations on the number one outcome students seek.
Continue increasing awareness. Over a year, we had only two employers outreach to Calbright first. Both of them became repeat partners. Every employer met through cold outreach had never heard of Calbright previously, and that limits the amount of relationships we can build without always taking the first step.