I Spent 6 Months Talking to University Career Services Directors.

Hey hey!

Ford Coleman here.

Quick note before I dive in:

You're getting this because we've crossed paths at some point - whether through Runway, my social content, or somewhere else along the way. If this isn't for you, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom. No hard feelings.

It's been about four months since I've sent one of these. Honest reason: most of my building-in-public energy has gone into social media. I've grown LinkedIn to 210K+ followers, Instagram to 110K+, and TikTok to 10K+, and that's where the day-to-day sharing has been happening.

But a newsletter is different. Longer. More honest. Better format for the thinking I want to share with this audience. So I'm getting back into it - weekly, starting now.

Over the last several months, I made it a point to get on calls with 60+ directors of career services at universities across the country to better understand the early career market. Different sizes, different regions, different student populations.

I went in thinking I'd hear a lot of variation. I didn't.

Here's what I took away.

They already know exactly what's broken

This was the first thing that surprised me. I expected to surface problems. Instead, every single person I talked to could name the failure points without hesitation.

Students apply to hundreds of jobs with no strategy and burn out. Employer ghosting destroys student confidence mid-search. The tools career services relies on sort of work but weren't built for the volume they're now dealing with. And the recruiting calendar keeps moving earlier - the urgency to start job searching now starts freshman year, not junior year. Most freshmen have no idea.

The constraint isn't awareness. It's bandwidth.

Most career services offices are small teams managing thousands of students. One advisor. Hundreds of students. The math doesn't work, and everyone knows it.

Students are mostly figuring this out on their own

This is the thing the data keeps pointing at.

After talking to career services directors, I also talked to hundreds of students directly. What struck me wasn't how lost they were - it was how resourceful they were being entirely on their own. ChatGPT to tailor resumes. Reddit threads to find openings. Cold LinkedIn messages to strangers, most of which go unanswered. One student told me he'd reached out to hundreds of people over the course of his search and spoken to maybe 20.

They're building their own systems because the existing ones don't move fast enough or speak their language. One student described applying to 200-300 jobs on Handshake as a freshman and landing two unpaid internships. Another told me he didn't even know follow-up emails were a thing until two weeks before we spoke.

The gap isn't that students don't want help. It's that the help available wasn't built for the search they're actually doing.

Employer ghosting is worse than people talk about

Almost every conversation I had with career services directors touched on this, usually unprompted. Students echoed it too.

Students apply. Sometimes they interview. Then nothing. No rejection, no update, just silence. One student described it as "applying and then hearing eight months later, oh, you got rejected."

The advisors I talked to understand why it happens - hiring isn't the top priority for most managers, and when no one's driving the process it stalls. But understanding it doesn't make it less damaging. A student who gets ghosted after an interview loses confidence in a way that's hard to recover from. And career services can coach students to follow up, but they can't make a hiring manager respond.

Handshake is everywhere. Nobody loves it.

This came up constantly. Every school uses it. Almost every advisor had a version of "it works, but..."

Students said the same thing unprompted. Old listings. Slow updates. Too many applicants on anything worth applying to. It's the default everyone's been handed, and the gap between what's available and what's actually useful is real and widely understood.

What this is all pointing at

I don't think this is a career services problem. The people I talked to are sharp, dedicated, and genuinely care about their students. They're working with what they have.

The system has a structural mismatch: it was designed for a job market that no longer exists. Application volume has exploded, the recruiting timeline has compressed, and the tools haven't kept up. Everyone downstream (advisors, students, hiring managers) is absorbing the cost of that.

I'm still figuring out what the right response looks like. But I'm glad I spent the time listening before assuming I already knew.

That's it for this one. Hit reply and tell me — if you work in hiring or higher ed, what's the thing you wish more people building in this space actually understood?

I read every response.

Keep progressing,

Ford Coleman 
Founder & CEO, Runway

P.S. If you know someone in hiring, higher ed, or building in this space - forward this their way. More perspectives make the thinking better.