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Here is a scenario that will feel familiar if you work in higher education career services.
A student books an appointment. They want help with their resume. You spend thirty minutes with them — you fix the formatting, sharpen the bullet points, maybe rewrite the summary. They thank you. They leave. You never see them again.
Six months later, they are one of four hundred applicants for a role they actually wanted. They get an automated rejection. They blame the resume.
The resume was fine. The resume was never the problem.
Jim Ducere, Assistant Dean of Placement and Career Services at Chapman University's Argyros College of Business and Economics, has spent years thinking about exactly this gap — the distance between what students ask for and what they actually need to compete in today's job market. The framework he built to close that gap is the subject of a recent careerOS webinar, and it is worth understanding in detail.
Not because it is complicated. But because it is the kind of thing that seems obvious in retrospect, and yet most career centers are not doing it.
Career services, at most institutions, runs on a transactional model. Student comes in. Student has a need. Advisor addresses the need. Student leaves. Repeat.
This is not anyone's fault. It is the natural result of high appointment volume, limited time, and students who often do not know what to ask for beyond the most visible deliverable — the resume.
But Jim argues that the transactional model has a structural flaw: it puts the student in charge of defining the scope of the help they receive. And students, almost by definition, cannot see the full picture of what they need. That is what they are coming to you for.
"Universities, for the most part, have failed students by teaching them how to apply to a job — and not how to get one," he said during the webinar. "There's a big difference."
A resume today is table stakes. Because AI tools have made it easy for every applicant to produce a polished document, the resume is no longer a differentiator. It is the price of entry — and it accounts for maybe ten to fifteen percent of what a student actually needs to land the role they want.
The rest of the equation: LinkedIn presence, networking strategy, company research, outreach, and interview preparation. All of it goes unaddressed when the appointment ends at the resume.
Jim's framework has five steps, each one designed to be its own appointment — and each one seeding curiosity about the next.
Step one is the resume. But Jim uses the resume appointment differently than most. While reviewing a student's experience, he is already looking ahead. He will notice something and say: "You have incredible experience here — your LinkedIn profile could be outstanding." Or: "Let's figure out what you actually want to do, because that changes how we position everything."
He calls this "sprinkling in the value." Each mention of a future step is a preview, not a pitch. The student doesn't feel sold to. They feel like they just glimpsed something they didn't know they were missing.
Step two is LinkedIn — a full appointment dedicated to building a profile that works as a networking tool, not just a digital resume. Jim walks students through headlines, summaries, skills optimization, and engagement strategy. He pulls up their profile during the session and shows them, in real time, whether a recruiter at their target company would find them. The demonstration lands harder than any explanation.
Step three is job research — the step most students skip entirely. Before anyone applies anywhere, Jim wants them to understand the landscape: which companies hire for the roles they want, who makes hiring decisions, what the realistic career path looks like, what success looks like in year one. Students who do this research sound different in interviews. They are different. And hiring managers notice.
Step four is networking — and this is where Jim is at his most direct. Networking is not optional. It is the most reliable path to employment, and yet it is the step students are most likely to avoid and advisors are least likely to teach with real specificity.
Jim's version of networking is built on what he calls "curious conversations" — genuine outreach to professionals not to ask for a job, but to understand an industry or career path better. This framing changes everything. It removes the transactional pressure that makes networking feel uncomfortable, and it actually generates more responses.
The data careerOS shared during the webinar illustrates just how much the method matters: US students who email US-based professionals directly receive responses at a rate twenty times higher than those who message on LinkedIn. Twenty times. Most students default to LinkedIn because it is easier. Teaching them to go one step further — finding a direct email, writing something personal and specific — is one of the highest-leverage things an advisor can do.
Step five is interview preparation. By this point in the framework, something has usually shifted in the student. They know their story. They have spoken to real people in their target industry. They understand the company they are interviewing with. The preparation feels different because the foundation underneath it is real. Jim focuses on professional storytelling, behavioral question preparation using the STAR method, and research integration — making sure students walk into every interview knowing things most candidates will not have bothered to find out.
The framework only works if students keep showing up. And Jim credits a surprisingly simple insight — borrowed from the salon business he grew up around — with making that happen.
At the end of every appointment, after he has sprinkled in the value and given the student a preview of what comes next, he asks: do you want to book your next appointment now?
Ninety percent say yes. Many book multiple appointments at once — one per week for the next month.
"When you really are providing students a glimpse of the value, they don't just show up. Half of them want to book one appointment each week for the next month," Jim said.
This is not a closing technique. It is the natural consequence of making the path visible. When students can see what they are working toward and feel the value of each step, they want to continue. The rebooking question is just the moment where that intention becomes an action.
The results at Chapman: appointment volume grew sixfold. On a given Friday, Jim might have eight to ten appointments — and more than half are students coming in to celebrate an offer or prepare for a final-round interview. That is a fundamentally different kind of career center.
The job market students are graduating into is genuinely harder to navigate than it was a decade ago. Application volumes are up. AI has compressed the quality gap between candidates at the materials level. Recruiters receive more noise and have less time to cut through it.
In that environment, the students who succeed are not the ones with the prettiest resume. They are the ones who understand that the resume is just the beginning — who have built real professional relationships, who can tell a compelling story, who have done the research that most candidates do not bother with.
Career advisors are in a unique position to teach those behaviors. But only if the advising model is designed to do more than answer the question that was asked.
Jim's five steps are not a silver bullet. They are a structure — one that gives advisors a clear path to walk students down, and gives students a clear picture of what it actually takes to compete. That clarity, as it turns out, is most of the work.
We've turned Jim's webinar into a free ebook that unpacks all five steps in full — including the advisor actions, the real data on outreach, and the mindset shifts that make the whole system work.
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