Education
Job board software for universities and bootcamps
A careers board at an educational institution is judged on graduate outcomes rather than on revenue, and that single fact reshapes the requirements. Who is allowed to apply matters more than how many apply. Which employers are allowed on matters more than how many roles there are. The reporting matters more than either.
From $79/month · 14-day free trial · No setup feesIt is also a buying decision made inside an institution rather than by an individual, which means the questions asked are about data ownership, access control and continuity rather than about features.
How the money works
A cost centre with two ways to stop being one
Most institutional careers boards are funded out of the careers service budget and produce nothing. That is a legitimate way to run one, and it is what most universities do.
The first route to self-funding is employer partnerships. Companies that recruit from your programmes repeatedly will pay for a standing presence: a branded employer page, priority placement, and inclusion in the events cycle. This is sold as a partnership rather than as advertising, and it is priced accordingly.
The second, more common at bootcamps than at universities, is the hiring-partner model, where employer access is the product and student placement is the outcome the whole institution is marketed on. That model puts far more weight on the board than a university careers page carries, and it changes what has to work: employer search, candidate profiles, and speed.
The question that decides it
“How do we make sure only our students can apply?”
Through required fields and approval on the account rather than through an identity integration. Candidate signup can require an institutional email domain, a student number, a programme and a cohort, and accounts can be held for approval until a member of staff releases them.
What is not available is single sign-on against your institutional identity provider. There is no SAML or Shibboleth integration. A student creates an account on the board with their institutional email; they do not arrive already authenticated from the student portal.
For a bootcamp this is usually fine. For a university where SSO is a procurement requirement, it is likely to be disqualifying, and Handshake or a similar sector-specific platform will fit the requirement better.
A board of this shape
Handshake
The incumbent in this sector, and the thing your careers service is probably already comparing against. It is worth being clear about what it is: a network, where the value is that employers and students from many institutions are already on it. An institution-owned board is the opposite trade. You give up the network and you get control of the employer relationships, the branding and the outcome data. Which of those matters more is the actual decision. Handshake Opens joinhandshake.com in a new tab
Look at Handshake
Named as a reference point, not as a Kardow customer. It does not run on Kardow and we
have no relationship with it.
What maps to your workflow
The parts of Kardow that do this job
01
Required fields at signup, enforced server-side
Programme, cohort, graduation year, student number: whatever your reporting needs, collected at account creation and enforced on the server rather than in the form, so an account cannot exist without them. 02
Approval on employers and on listings
Both accounts and postings can be held for review. An institution carries reputational risk from every employer on its board, and approval is what makes that manageable. 03
Separate student and employer account types
Two distinct account types with different permissions, different signup fields and different pricing, which is what allows a student experience and an employer experience to coexist on one board. 04
Documents held with access control
Resumes, transcripts and portfolio files attach to applications with per-file access rules, which matters when the files are student records rather than ordinary attachments. 05
Your data, exportable
Applications, outcomes and employer records export as CSV on demand. Outcome data is what the institution is measured on, and it should not live somewhere you cannot get it out of. The honest limit
Where Kardow is the wrong answer here
No SSO, no student information system integration, and no built-in careers-appointment scheduling. If your procurement process requires any of those, a sector platform will meet the requirement and we will not. Kardow fits an institution that wants to own its board and its data, and has someone technical enough to connect it to the rest of the stack. Not sure which side you are on? Ask us.
Questions
What people ask before they build one.
- Can alumni use the board as well as current students?
- Yes, and it is usually worth designing for from the start rather than adding later. Alumni are both candidates and employers: they hire, and they are the employer relationships that are easiest to build. Account types can distinguish current students, alumni and employers, with different access and different signup requirements for each.
- What about placement and internship listings specifically?
- They are ordinary listings with your own fields on them. Placement year, credit-bearing, duration, start window and supervisor requirements are all configurable fields that become filters on the board, which is what students actually need in order to find the right one.
- Who owns the data if we stop using Kardow?
- You do, and you can take it with you. Jobs, applications, employer records and candidate accounts export on demand, and on Pro and above the board itself is a Next.js application you can download and host yourself. That answer is the one an institutional buyer is actually asking for, and it is a fair reason to prefer an owned board over a network platform.
Build it and see whether it works
Every plan includes a 14-day trial and there is no setup fee, so the cost of finding out is one month. Kardow starts at $79 a month. Closest to this one
All use cases Associations A career centre as a member benefit, with member and non-member pricing and invoices your finance team will accept. Nonprofits A sector board where posting is free for the organisations you exist to serve and paid for the ones that can afford it. Accelerators A cross-cohort hiring board that keeps working after demo day, when the companies need it most.