What makes WayFindersU different is that it isn’t positioned as just a student engagement program or a career-services initiative. RoleCall provides a community-wide talent retention strategy designed to help students see a future in the community and stay to make it home.
We recently announced WayFindersU, a new student community retention program aimed at keeping college graduate talent in your community and workforce. During a recent informational WayFindersU webinar, “Turn Student Retention into Regional Workforce & Economic Growth," an attendee asked this thoughtful question (thanks, Kiersten!):
“If there are similar student retention programs that exist, how is
WayFindersU different?”
This is really the best kind of question. One that gets an answer, and then sparks thoughts on other ways it could have been answered. This one even led me to ask myself other, similar questions. I want to give a full answer, because it’s that important.
Traditional student retention programs often focus on internships, job fairs, or employment placement. WayFindersU goes beyond the job by creating connections to local employers, mentors, peers, leadership opportunities and the community itself. The goal is for a student to understand, “I can stay to build a career and a life here," and to connect them with resources to find a job upon graduation.
WayFindersU is for the community, not just the university. This may be one of the biggest differentiators for an EDO, chamber, city or community because it creates a shared ecosystem where:
WayFindersU converts your community's education investment into long-term economic growth.
The short answer? Probably. Colleges and universities work extremely hard to provide programs and assistance for their students to help them find meaningful careers. Part of the problem we're trying to solve includes this: "On average, 59% of applications from graduating students have been submitted to jobs outside of the state where the candidate’s school is located (Handshake 2025)."
WayFindersU isn't necessarily asking a community to build an entirely separate student program from scratch. It can expand and enhance existing initiatives to achieve greater success.
I’ve known my share of career center teams, and they’re awesome. They’re passionate and hard-working. Truthfully, it’s part of the reason we created WayFindersU: to include them! We have not found, though, a program that incorporates every person, network, and segment of the complicated career search journey. That’s why we built WayFindersU.
When we create anything at RoleCall, our first step is to determine if the idea is worthwhile. In this case, I had dozens of conversations with economic developers, chamber professionals, companies, and higher education teams to determine if our student retention idea and strategy were sound. I got a resounding, “Yes.” I was also reminded that all of these groups are BUSY. And while that was clear (and very, very real), each of them agreed that retaining college students is essential and challenging. But nobody has really cracked the code on how to help. Until now.
It also becomes more and more clear every day that the job search and application process is broken. AI has taken over the process on both the applicant and HR sides.
People get jobs because they meet the right person or get referred by the right person. WayFindersU facilitates and expedites this exact experience. We’re not trying to convince students to stay. We’re helping them discover reasons to want to stay.
Our work at RoleCall has always centered on stakeholder engagement and feedback.
They’ve all been part of the work since day one, and our expertise makes us uniquely qualified to bring a college student retention strategy to life. Just like our other talent solutions, we focus on trackable, measurable outcomes, including talent captured, engagement, conversion and economic impact. For your community, that means the conversation can move from:
"We hosted some great student events," to: "How many students did we engage? How many connected with local employers? How many students were hired locally and stayed? What industries are we serving for employers and students? What economic impact did that retention create?"
Additionally, retaining college students is part of every strategy we’ve built. And while that’s great, we knew we needed to do more. We’ve got plenty of experience in this niche, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring WayFindersU to communities across the country for you.