Should Career Services Offer a Guarantee?

Guarantees come standard on most products we buy: whether it’s a new iPod or a box of cereal. If we’re not satisfied, we can return it. Guarantees on services are much less common, but they do exist. Some ski resorts and amusement parks offer guarantees, for instance. Guarantees convey a sense of quality and reliability and also reassure customers that if the product or service does not work as promised, the customer will be compensated. So if you are confident in the quality of work you do in Career Services, shouldn’t you offer a guarantee?

Three years ago I developed a workshop on the topic of marketing to students for Career Services offices. I presented it several times through webinars and also at the NACE Conference in New York. Not surprisingly, the topic attracted a very large audience each time it was presented because engaging students in their career development is both consistently challenging and a key focus for Career Services. The workshop covered several different key topics related to achieving credibility among students, ensuring that what you are offering really speaks to students, and so on. I also posed a challenge to participants: offer your students a service guarantee.

A guarantee is, in essence, an agreement between the customer and the provider. When I buy an iPod, I promise not to throw it down the stairs and if I do, I don’t expect the guarantee to apply. Similarly, with a service guarantee it is assumed that I will do my part: if I don’t give my accountant the right information, I can’t expect her to give me the right results. So a guarantee in Career Services would require a certain level of duty and commitment on the part of students.

Since a guarantee in a Career Services office represents an agreement between the student and Career Services, both are expected to do their part or the guarantee is null and void. Your statement of guarantee needs to specifically state what is expected of your students. Given this basis – the understanding that to “qualify” for the guarantee your students must invest a certain amount of effort – you may feel more confident about raising the bar of commitment that you are willing to make.

But what happens if your students do their part and still don’t get the result you promise? There’s usually no payment to refund, and more importantly, you can’t give them back the time they have invested. But you can do a number of things they will value greatly, the best of which is to listen to them and respond in a helpful way. Give them a meeting with the director, heap additional support and service upon them. Go the distance for them and they will become stronger allies than some of your most successful students. Again, these details must be described in your guarantee statement.

A first step in offering a service guarantee may be to start out with it as an option for just a certain group of students or a specific program. Select one of your best programs and create a guarantee or “service agreement” around it. Offer students the option of signing up for that agreement and explain clearly what is expected of them and what they can expect from you in return. Just imagine what it could do for their confidence in you, themselves, and the potential outcomes of your program!

To be clear, I am not suggesting that you guarantee your students a job – not unless you believe that that would be both achievable and consistent with your mandate. However, if your goal is to support students’ career development; or to create opportunities for them to connect with employers; or to develop job search skills, those are probably the kinds of things that you could be guaranteeing.

Offering a service guarantee can go a long way to increasing your credibility with students as true experts with whom they should invest their time. At the same time, it can increase students’ commitment to the process and thereby lead to better outcomes.

But what about the idea of guaranteeing students jobs upon graduation? That may not be a suitable offer for every Career Services office – at least not without the commitment of your entire institution. But is it necessarily an absurd idea? That’s the guarantee that the University of Regina launched last September (http://www.urconnected.ca/urguarantee) - but further discussion of that will have to wait until a future article.