Salesforce does not offer a job marketplace; Handshake or Symplicity keep that role. Education Cloud holds the institution's side of career services: coaching appointments, employer and partnership records, internships and placements, outcomes, career planning, and mentoring, on the Person Account that later becomes the alumni record. ElevateActual built a career hub this way for a private university.
Where the Institution Starts
Career services usually runs on a job marketplace, a scheduling tool, a spreadsheet of employer contacts, and a first-destination survey in a survey product. The marketplace does its job: students find postings, employers post them, and fairs get organized. What the office cannot answer is the institutional question: which employers have an active relationship with us, who owns it, which programs feed which employers, how many students in a program completed an internship, and what happened to last year's graduates. Advancement is asking the same employers for gifts, and nobody knows. That is where Salesforce fits, and it is the scope of our career services solution.
What Does Salesforce Not Do?
Salesforce does not offer a student-employer job board, and we do not build one. Handshake and Symplicity (owned by Volaris Group since February 2026) handle postings, employer self-service, applications, and fair logistics, and they sit beside the institution's Salesforce org. The LMS holds coursework and e-portfolios. Replacing either with custom objects produces a worse job board and a worse LMS, and it consumes the budget that should go to the relationship layer.
What Does Education Cloud Provide for Career Services?
Education Cloud (Agentforce Education) covers career services through three groups of standard features, all documented on Salesforce Help as of October 2026.
- Career Planning and Life Goals. Part of Student Success. Students take career and interest assessments from a library, join involvement groups, record competencies from classes, clubs, and work, maintain a profile, and set goals with action plans. Advisors see the same assessments and groups and recommend fits. The components run on the Experience Cloud learner portal.
- Mentoring. Mentoring programs are support programs with benefits. Mentors and mentees carry mentoring profiles, a mentor comparison screen flow matches them on the fields the institution chooses, and a mentoring portal lets participants discover and enroll.
- Corporate Relations. Documented under Alumni and Advancement and built on two objects introduced in API version 67.0. A
PartnershipAgreementis a governed, time-bound agreement with an external organization, with categories such as Hiring Partnership, Training Agreement, and Research Collaboration. APartnershipPersonPlacementis a verified placement under that agreement, linking a person to a program and a partner organization, covering on-campus roles, research, internships, and employment. Placements feed Outcome Management, so career outcomes roll up next to the academic record. Salesforce Help contrasts these with plain account relationships: a relationship record says a connection exists; an agreement governs it and a placement measures it.
Appointments use Salesforce Scheduler, the same ServiceAppointment model advising uses, so career coaches and academic advisors share one calendar and support-pool mechanism.
Where Does Each Capability Live?
| Capability | Salesforce (Education Cloud) | Job marketplace (Handshake, Symplicity) | LMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job and internship postings, student applications | No | Yes, system of record | No |
| Career fair registration and logistics | Attendance synced to the Person Account where the marketplace exposes it | Yes | No |
| Career coaching appointments | Yes, Salesforce Scheduler on the advising case | Some offer scheduling; we recommend one calendar | No |
| Employer and partnership records | Yes, Account plus PartnershipAgreement, shared with advancement | Employer self-service profile only | No |
| Internship, apprenticeship, and placement tracking | Yes, PartnershipPersonPlacement per person per experience | Posting and application history | Credit-bearing internship coursework and grades |
| Career outcomes and first destination | Yes, placement records plus Outcome Management, next to enrollment data | Survey tools in some products | No |
| Assessments, competencies, goals | Yes, Career Planning and Life Goals on the portal | Limited | Course-level outcomes |
| Mentoring programs | Yes, mentoring profiles, matching, and portal | Some offer networking features | No |
| Recorded terms and FERPA release | Yes, consent records on the person | Vendor terms only | No |
| Alumni continuation | Yes, same Person Account moves into advancement | Separate alumni product or none | No |
What Does a Career Hub on Education Cloud Look Like?
We built a career hub on Education Cloud for a private university; the design decisions below are the ones that project settled.
Access Driven From the Enrollment Record
The hub is a section of the institution's learner portal rather than a separate site. Access is not granted by hand. A record-triggered flow on AcademicTermEnrollment and LearnerProgram assigns and removes the career hub permission set and the matching portal audience as enrollment status changes. A newly enrolled student gets the hub on day one; a student who leaves keeps read access to their own records for a defined period; a graduate moves to the alumni audience. Nobody maintains a list.
Employer Approval Gates
Employers reach the institution through the marketplace, through advancement, and through faculty. In Salesforce, every employer is an Account, and the question is whether it is an approved partner. A PartnershipAgreement record goes through an approval flow before its status becomes Active: the career services director confirms the category and the terms, and where the employer is also a donor prospect, advancement is notified. Placements can be recorded only under an active agreement, which keeps the outcomes data honest.
Recorded Terms Acceptance
Sharing a student's enrollment status or program with an employer is a FERPA matter. On the hub, a student who opts into employer introductions or a mentoring match accepts a terms statement, and the acceptance is stored as a consent record on the Person Account with the text version and the timestamp. Flows that share data with an employer check for a current acceptance first, and when the terms change, the flow asks again. Counsel owns the text; the system owns the proof.
Outcomes Next to Enrollment
Because a placement is a standard record tied to the person, the program, and the partner, the first-destination report is a report, not a survey import. The director sees internships per program per term, placements per employer, and outcomes by graduating cohort next to retention and completion, on the same dashboards. Where the institution still runs a graduate survey, the responses update the same placement records.
Graduates Stay on the Record
At graduation, the Person Account does not change. The career hub audience ends, the alumni audience begins, and the advancement team inherits the full history: appointments, placements, employers, and mentoring. Former mentees become the mentor pool a few years later, and the employers that hired them are already accounts with a relationship owner. Our advancement solution picks up from there.
The One Trap: Treating the Marketplace Export as the Data Model
The quickest way to populate Salesforce is to import the job marketplace's employer and student activity export into custom objects that mirror its columns. The import works. The model does not. The export is organized around postings and applications, which are the marketplace's concern; the institution's concerns are agreements, placements, and outcomes, which are different records with different lifecycles. Load employers as Accounts, agreements as PartnershipAgreement, and confirmed experiences as PartnershipPersonPlacement, and treat the marketplace feed as an activity source that updates those records. Posting history stays in the marketplace, where it is already searchable.
What to Decide Before Building
- Who owns an employer. Career services, advancement, a corporate relations office, or a shared owner with roles. This decides Account ownership and the approval gate.
- What counts as a placement. Internships, apprenticeships, on-campus roles, research, and post-graduation employment each have a different verification source; decide which are recorded and who verifies.
- The consent text and its owner. Counsel writes it; the project needs it before the hub opens.
- What the marketplace feed provides. Attendance, employer profiles, and application activity vary by vendor and contract. Confirm what is available before designing around it.
- The student success boundary. Whether career advising is its own Case record type with its own success team, as Salesforce Help's model allows, or part of the general advising case. Our student success page explains the workspace model.
- Portal placement. A section of the learner portal or a separate site; one site is cheaper and keeps a single login.
The vocabulary on this page (Education Cloud, Corporate Relations, Outcome Management, Person Account) is defined in our glossary, and the broader picture is in the Salesforce for higher education guide.
Questions We Hear
Does Salesforce replace Handshake?
No. Salesforce does not offer a student-employer job marketplace, and we do not build one. Handshake, Symplicity, or the institution's marketplace of choice keeps postings, applications, employer self-service, and fair logistics. Salesforce sits beside it and holds the institution's relationships, appointments, placements, outcomes, and consent. Where the marketplace exposes data through an API or an export, that data updates the Salesforce records.
Is Corporate Relations part of career services or advancement?
Salesforce documents it under Alumni and Advancement, and the objects serve both offices. A hiring partnership and a sponsored research agreement are both partnership agreements; career services cares about placements under the first, advancement about the gift conversation with the same company. One Account and one agreement record with clear ownership roles is the design. Expect a governance conversation between the two offices before the build, not after.
Can students use Career Planning and Life Goals without a career hub project?
Yes. Career Planning and Life Goals is part of Student Success in Education Cloud and runs on the standard learner portal components: assessments, involvement groups, competencies, profile, and goals with action plans. An institution that already has the learner portal can turn these on with configuration. The career hub work on this page adds the employer side: agreements, placements, consent, and outcomes reporting.
How do we record internships that happen through the job marketplace?
The student applies and is hired in the marketplace. The confirmed experience is recorded in Salesforce as a PartnershipPersonPlacement under the employer's agreement, created either by the career office from a marketplace report, by the student through a hub form that the office verifies, or by the faculty supervisor for credit-bearing internships. Verification is the point: a placement in Salesforce means the institution confirmed it, which is what the outcomes report needs.
What does the FERPA piece look like in practice?
A terms statement written by counsel, shown on the hub before a student opts into employer introductions or mentoring, with acceptance stored as a consent record on the Person Account including the text version and the timestamp. Any flow that shares student data with an external party checks for a current acceptance first and stops if it is missing or outdated. Reports show who has accepted which version, which answers the audit question without a spreadsheet.