You Hired Them. You Can Fight for Them.
This week I am presenting at the NACE Conference. It has me reflecting on the wonderful partnerships I have had with University Recruiting over the years. They are some of the hardest working employees I have ever met.
I also, for the first time ever, am thinking about the trust they placed in me when I was working as a program manager for an early career rotation program. They spent months, sometimes years, developing relationships with prospective candidates. The relationships were not transactional. They weren't just filling quotas. They were genuine, and in many cases, lifelong.
And then comes a day when the recruiting side of the process is over and they hand off their friends to me, trusting that I will care for them and invest in them. I didn't realize any of this at the time, but it feels significant now.
But here's what I don't know: how many university recruiters have these types of early career development partners in the companies they work for. There isn't always a trusted person on the other side who continues to care for the people they care for.
The Gap Nobody Talks About
Campus recruiting is a sophisticated, well-resourced function at many companies. Early career development often is less so. Companies spend significantly more money and time acquiring early career talent than developing it. If your retention numbers are lower than you would like, this could be one of the reasons why.
The research is clear on this. Lack of career development has been the number one reason employees quit for more than ten consecutive years, according to Work Institute. Early career employees are particularly vulnerable — they're navigating a new environment, building relationships from scratch, and trying to prove themselves, all at the same time. Without intentional support, too many of them hit a wall in year one or two and start looking outside.
The recruiter who worked so hard to hire them often feels the weight of when things don’t work out.
Why Recruiters Are Actually Well Positioned to Change This
University Recruiters may not always realize the influence they have.
You have data. You know how long it took to fill each role. You know what it costs when someone leaves in year two and you have to start over. Cost per hire. Time to fill. First-year attrition rates. When a recruiter can walk into a conversation with HR leadership or a business leader and say "we are losing X% of our early career hires in the first two years, and here is what that is costing us in recruiting alone" — that gets attention.
But you also have something the data doesn't capture.
Early career employees don't always tell their manager when something is wrong. The relationship is too new, the stakes feel too high, and the fear of being seen as a problem is very real. But they will tell their recruiter. The person who knew them before the job, who called to check in, who felt like an ally before they even started.
Recruiters carry stories that HR leadership never hears. Stories about employees who are struggling, disengaged, or quietly looking. Stories that, if surfaced at the right moment and framed the right way, could make the case for investment more powerfully than any spreadsheet.
You have the numbers. You have the relationships. And you have the trust of the very people the company is trying to keep.
Use all of it.
What That Investment Actually Looks Like
Intentional early career development doesn't have to be elaborate. A cohort-based workshop series that builds foundational leadership skills — how to build trust, create clarity, and sustain motivation — can shift engagement and retention meaningfully. Add structured opportunities for early career employees to connect with managers and leaders across the organization, and you start to close the network gap that drives so many early exits.
The companies that do this well don't just retain more people. They build a reputation for developing people. And a strong reputation makes the recruiter's job easier the next time they're selling the company to a candidate.
You Found Them. Help Them Stay.
Recruiting and development are two halves of the same investment. The offer letter isn't the finish line. It’s just the first lap in what is hopefully a long race.
If you've been frustrated watching great hires leave before they reach their potential, you're not powerless. You have the data, you have the relationships, and you have the credibility that comes from being the person who found them in the first place.
If you're looking for a partner to help make that internal case — or to deliver the development experience your early career employees deserve — I'd love to have that conversation.