A career coordinator helps match graduating students with companies looking to hire people into entry-level positions. A career coordinator must prepare students for interviewing and getting their first job in their desired field. The coordinator also must have strong communication skills in order to deal with companies and discover what jobs are available. The biggest challenge is matching these two parties together — the students looking for jobs and the companies looking to hire new employees — in order to build a successful relationship.
Career coordinators are most commonly found in a university or technical college. Many times, the coordinator will work with specific departments in order to focus his or her attention on a limited area of jobs and employers. A career coordinator also can work at a job placement service or a temp agency in order to find capable workers and matching industries. The educational world is where the bulk of this work is performed.
A career coordinator must be able to work with students who often are unprepared for the working world and must get them ready for it. Editing résumés is a large job for the coordinator, because he or she must make suggestions about how to better explain experience, how to change the structure of the résumé and how to give it a professional appearance. The coordinator also helps prepare students for the rigors of job application by staging mock interviews to give students practice answering questions and speaking about themselves.
The other half of the career coordinator's job requires him or her to be a sort of information coordinator, working with a variety of employers. The first step is establishing a relationship with a company's hiring manager, asking them for notification when new openings arise and repeating this with as many companies as possible to offer students the greatest number of employment opportunities. He or she often must use strong communication tactics by keeping in contact with companies, because many are too busy to update a career coordinator with every job. The coordinator must work with a company's schedule to set up interviews for students.
A career coordinator must be able to juggle these two roles and play matchmaker. He or she must evaluate a student's talents and experience to match them with a company that can utilize that person. The coordinator must take into account working environments, personality types and job complexity when considering a proper fit. He or she also must consider multiple options, because what he or she thinks is a perfect match might not be a company's dream employee.
