Only 6% of campus recruiting teams can prove they're worth it

What the report found

Yello surveyed campus recruiting professionals for its 2026 report and found 6% very confident in their ability to measure ROI. It framed the question leadership is now putting to them directly: does attending 150 campus events matter if 50 of them lead to quality hires? For years campus recruiting reported activity, events attended, resumes collected, candidates in the pipeline. Leadership has started asking for outcomes, and most teams don't have them.

The budget context makes the question sharper. NACE's 2024 benchmarks put the median university recruiting budget at $114,000, with half of organizations reporting no change from the prior year. NACE's 2023 report found the average number of recruiters had fallen to 7.2 from 9.0. Flat money, fewer people, and a CFO asking what the campus program produces.

Why they can't measure it

Attribution. A hire who attended a fair, went to an information session, applied through the school platform, and was referred by an alumnus counts as a hire from which channel? The data lives in three or four systems that don't talk to each other. The applicant tracking system knows who applied. The events platform knows who attended. The career center knows who was a student. Nobody has joined the records.

Career centers have the same problem in reverse. Which student was "placed" by the career center? The one who came to three workshops and found the job on LinkedIn? The one who never came in and got hired through a fair the center ran? Both sides report activity because outcomes can't be assigned.

The shared problem

If neither side can attribute outcomes, both sides are reporting the same weak numbers to different bosses. The recruiter reports events attended. The career center reports employers at the fair. Each is evidence that something happened and neither is evidence that it mattered.

The honest version of this is that campus recruiting and career services are two halves of one funnel, and the funnel has never been measured end to end because each half only holds its own data.

The opening

The career center holds the half the employer is missing.

An employer can see who applied and who was hired. It usually can't see which of those people attended its information session, which came to the fair, which met a recruiter at a faculty-hosted event, and which had been to the career center at all. The career center can see all of that, and through the first-destination survey it can also see where students ended up and, if it asks, whether they stayed.

Put together, that's a per-cycle yield report an employer can't produce for itself. Events run, students reached, applications through the platform, interviews, offers, hires, one-year retention where known. Delivered each cycle, for the employer's campus program at your institution.

Almost no employer gets that from any school. The recruiter who receives it has something to show a CFO. The career center that provides it has become the partner that solves the employer's stated problem, which is the definition of a tier-one relationship, and it costs a spreadsheet rather than a sponsorship.

What has to be true for this to work

FERPA governs identifiable student data. Aggregate funnel counts are fine. Identifiable outcomes need consent. The multi-source first-destination methodology NACE allows, drawing on employer confirmation and public professional profiles, helps here because employer-side data about their own hires isn't an education record.

Attribution should be reported, not claimed. "Twelve students who attended your September information session applied; four were hired" is a fact. "Our information session produced four hires" is a claim nobody can verify. Give employers the first kind.

Retention needs the employer's cooperation. Most will give one-year retention for their own hires if asked, because it's a number they track.

What this means for career services

Build the report for your top ten employers this cycle. Not all of them. Ten.

Ask each what their internal ROI measure is. It's usually cost per hire, intern conversion, or first-year retention. Give them the numbers that feed it rather than the numbers you find interesting.

Deliver it before they ask, and before their budget conversation, which for most corporate campus teams happens in late spring for the following fall.

Then track what changes. An employer that receives a yield report and increases its presence has told you the report was worth something. One that doesn't has told you something too.

What would change this reading

If Yello's next report showed ROI confidence rising sharply, employers would be solving the attribution problem themselves and the opening would close. If NACE's recruiting benchmarks began reporting standard outcome metrics across employers, the report would be less valuable because it would be common. If employers turned out not to use the data when given it, the opening was never there. So far, the 6% figure suggests it is.