Assessment and pathway discovery for career services — not a NACE reporting tool.

No. The NACE Standards and Protocols for the Collection and Dissemination of Graduating Student Initial Career Outcomes Information define the first-destination categories (employed, continuing education, military, service, seeking, not seeking) and the knowledge-rate methodology institutions report against. JobCannon does not collect post-graduation outcome data and does not produce NACE- or EDFacts-formatted reports — it operates upstream of the survey, in the assessment and advising work that happens before students graduate. What you get is per-student assessment results, dated, and a cohort-level CSV export you can fold into your own FDS data-collection process alongside self-report, LinkedIn/Lightcast and National Student Clearinghouse matching. For the FDS methodology itself, see our first-destination survey guide linked below.

Especially well. Liberal-arts students often arrive at career services in junior year with no strong career conviction and a major (English, Philosophy, History, Sociology) without an obvious vocational ladder. The platform's strength is showing which of the 2,521 careers their personality, interests, and skills actually match — Career Match output for an English major might surface technical writing, content strategy, learning experience design, journalism, and law-adjacent paths the student had not considered. The conversation moves from "what can I do with English" to "given who you are, here are eight realistic paths and here is the prerequisite work for each".

Complementary. Handshake and Symplicity are CRM-and-job-posting platforms — they manage employer relationships, on-campus recruiting, application pipelines. JobCannon is the assessment-and-discovery layer that surfaces which jobs to consider; the student then applies to those roles via Handshake or Symplicity. Many universities run both; the integration is at the workflow level (career services advisor mentions a Career Match path, student searches that path on Handshake) not at the API level. We do not replace the application-management surface.

Yes, with caveats. PhD students and master's students take the same assessments; Career Match outputs include academic-track, industry-track, and policy-track roles relevant to their field. For STEM PhDs considering academia-versus-industry, the Big Five and EQ data is particularly useful. For humanities and social science PhDs facing the academic job market, Career Match surfaces a wider set of realistic non-academic paths — research consulting, policy analysis, foundation programme work, museum and archive roles — without the platform pretending the academic market is healthy. We do not give academic job-market advice; we give pathway data.

You can assign the same assessments at any point in a student's time with you — a first-year orientation baseline, a Career Match refresh when they declare or change majors, a senior-year check before the job search. Each result is dated and attached to the student in your cohort dashboard. Be clear on what this is not: there is no year-over-year comparison view, no automatic link between a student's assessment history and their eventual first-destination outcome, and no cross-cohort pattern analysis. A team that wants that has to build it themselves, by exporting the CSV data across years and combining it with whatever outcome data your FDS process separately collects. We give you dated per-student and cohort snapshots; the longitudinal analysis is not something the platform runs for you.

It removes the two most time-consuming parts: chasing non-starters and building the cohort picture by hand. Share one invite list or class code with a year group; the dashboard shows one list — who has not started, who is in progress, who has finished — and chases non-starters with automatic reminder emails so you do not have to. Across the cohort you get interest and personality distribution, RIASEC and Big Five averages, and a CSV export for a report to your dean or board. Be clear on what it does not do: there is no priority score, no triage queue, and no way to assign a student to a named counsellor. A two-person team serving 1,800 students still has to decide who gets a 1:1 conversation — this removes the chasing and the spreadsheet work around that decision, it does not make the decision for you.