So for background, I supervise the alumni outreach/career services department at our technical college. We have three campuses, and the program is 15 weeks long.
We've experience two different senarios where third party verifiers were utilized.
One is like Edward above described, where we were required, due to re-accreditation, to hire a third party to verify all of the employment information we had reported on the previous year. It's a pretty straight forward process assuming the inforamation you provide them is accurate.
The second senario is a little different. Several years ago, between growth and the increasing regulatory burden, we recognized the need for additional staff to handle career services (previous to this various staff just got a list of graduates to call in preperation for the annual report).
We decided to hire a contractor to take care of all the graduate contact for us. This didn't work particularly well. Ultimately we ended up taking the project back from the contractor. The issues we identified were two fold. First, I don't feel that contractors have as much skin in the game and thus may not be as engaged/driven in the project as the school's staff would be. The second issue it didn't seem like many graduates were comfortable providing personal information to a third party, even though the contractor identified that they were calling/emailing on behalf of the school.
We've ultimately hired one full time staff member to follow up with graduates. This person also process transcript requests and serves as the "help desk" for graduates. We also have some part time asssitance in the few months leading up to our annual report deadlines.
We also had/have issues with getting our graduates to let us know where they've gone to work. Over the past couple of years we've worked to create a relationship with our graduates before they ever leave school so that they know who will be contacting them, and so that they understand why. We've also created numerous avenues of contact with them. We utilize facebook to make contact and communicate with students as email doesn't tend to generate the responses we need (although we still use it). We've also begun to text the graduates. This has probably worked better than anyting thus far. We also added an area to provide employment information to our transcript reqeusts and that helps too as they are more willing to provide information when they need someting.
Hope this helps.
