What is employer relations performance?

Why is volume no longer enough?

For a long time, an employer relations team was judged by the number of partners signed and the turnout at a fair: the more people, the better. That reasoning is running out of road on both sides of the relationship.

On the employer side, target school lists are shrinking. In the United States, recruiters targeted 39 schools on average in 2020; they target 25 in 2024, according to Veris Insights. Every school still on that list has to justify its place, every year.

That shrinking is not universal, which is what makes it worth looking at twice. In the United Kingdom, the large employers studied by High Fliers Research targeted an average of 27 universities in 2024, after a low of 22 in earlier years: the list widened, not shrank. Both movements tell the same story from two opposite ends of the cycle: employers adjust their list against what a school shows them, in either direction.

On the school side, every euro an employer partner spends is also a euro closely tracked internally. A campus recruiting team runs on a median annual budget of $114,000 in the United States in 2024, according to NACE. Facing turnout it cannot tie to a single hire, leadership cuts that budget before renewing it.

Employer relations performance answers this double pressure: sell partnerships to targeted groups of students rather than room size, and prove afterwards what each one produced.

What a school loses when it cannot answer that pressure rarely shows up straight away. A partner rarely says it is leaving because it never received a figure; it simply leaves quietly the following year, replaced on its budget by another school, another initiative, or neither. Employer relations performance does not prevent that departure, but it gives the team a figure to put on the table before it happens.

What are the four indicators that matter?

Four numbers are enough to tell a partner the story of their partnership.

The first, attendees, reads out on the day itself. The next three take time: an application turns into a hire weeks or months later, once the placement is validated or the graduate outcomes survey comes back. That lag is why so few schools still link a hire back to the event that made it possible.

These four indicators are not four isolated numbers: they answer each other. Attendees bound what is reasonable to expect in applications; applications bound what is reasonable to expect in hires; hires, set against what was invested, give the one figure a partner actually remembers, their cost per hire. Tracking all four stops a school celebrating high attendance that produced no hires, or underrating a small event that produced several.

Indicator	What it measures	Formula or source
Attendees	Students who came to the event	Counted at check-in
Applications	Applications sent to the employer after the event	Counted over the following period
Hires	Placements, apprenticeships or jobs won by students met at the event	Matched against validated placement agreements and the outcomes survey
Cost per hire	What the hire cost the employer through this channel	Spend ÷ hires

How is performance measured before, during and after an event?

Before, the targeted group is built with the partner, on the criteria it asks for (programme, search stage, role type), rather than on room size. A smaller, more precise group is often worth more than a large, loosely qualified one.

During, registrations and attendance are checked, to know not just how many students came, but who.

After, the results report brings together what was invested, who was met and what came out of it. That is the document that lands on a partner's desk before their renewal decision.

Between during and after sits a stretch often overlooked: the weeks that follow an event, when some students met have received no invitation to apply, and some applications received have no answer yet. Pypelane is designed to surface these pending decisions, such as a group of students that matches a partner but has never been invited, and prepare them so the team decides rather than forgets.

What are the two documents that prove it?

The targeted event offer, sent before the event, presents the partner with the proposed group of matching students, the number of places and the price. It moves the negotiation from visitor numbers to the value of that group.

The results report, sent afterwards, sets out what the partner invested, met and hired, with their cost per hire and a recommendation for what comes next. The guide on proving a partnership's results details the five blocks of this document.

Example. A general fair costs the employer £8,500 for 210 attendees and 2 hires, or £4,250 per hire. A targeted event, at £12,000, brings 41 attendees but 4 hires, or £3,000 per hire. That is exactly what a results report makes visible, with your own figures.

Where do most schools stand today?

Many schools know how many students registered for a fair. Few know how many were hired, and by which employer.

The information exists, though: in the partner file, in the careers platform, in placement agreements signed off by the registry, in the graduate outcomes survey. It is simply scattered across tools that do not talk to each other, which makes the calculation possible in theory and slow to redo by hand, partner by partner, in practice.

It is this gap between data that exists and data that is used which explains why so many renewals are still negotiated on an impression rather than a figure.

This gap is not unique to smaller institutions. A large university with several faculties faces the same problem at greater scale: each faculty runs its own partners in its own spreadsheet, and no one at the centre can say what a partner active across several faculties brings to the institution as a whole.

How do you start, with or without a tool?

Without a tool: pick three or four priority partners, gather for each what was invested, who was met and what came out of it, and set the cost per hire with the calculator in a few minutes.

Pypelane is designed to bring these sources together from a simple export and produce the results report automatically, partner by partner, with no re-keying.

In both cases, order matters more than speed. Starting with the partners who carry the most weight in revenue, or who show signs of drifting away, produces something useful within a few weeks, rather than aiming at the whole portfolio and producing nothing for months.