Early careers teams are investing more in outreach. Maryam Al-Makhzoumi at Uptree considers how to measure success beyond who gets hired.
Traditional ROI metrics, such as conversion rates and application numbers, miss the broader impact of early engagement on student development. This includes how confident students feel to apply, the skills they gain, and how they perceive an employer long after the event.
In this context, 'student experience' encompasses every interaction a student has with an employer – whether through career insight events, work experience, or post-hire feedback.
Student experience not only tracks whether a student applies, but how these experiences shape their perception of an employer, skills, and future aspirations.
For employers, this builds long-term brand trust, widens the future talent pool, and supports more inclusive recruitment. For students, it builds confidence, career clarity, and professional experience, regardless of whether they apply to an organisation. More broadly, it means a more diverse, informed, and better-prepared workforce.
Why measuring student experience matters
To measure the true impact of early careers engagement, employers need a holistic view of the full journey. This means capturing students’ experiences at multiple touchpoints, from their first encounters with the employer through to application and post-hire.
Tracking these experiences at each stage helps employers to see how perceptions shift over time, and reframes ROI from short-term conversion to long-term retention. It highlights the moments where perceptions are reshaped, and can indicate stronger intent to apply and thrive at an organisation.
Student experience at Lloyds Banking Group
Lloyds Banking Group’s collaboration with Uptree shows how a skills-focused approach to early careers outreach can enhance impact and build stronger talent pipelines, which ultimately supports their customer service innovation.
Through in-school Skillsbuilder sessions, targeted work experience events, and outreach prioritising underrepresented groups such as care-experienced students, Lloyds has helped build confidence and capability among diverse student groups.
In fact, post-event feedback from Insight Days with Uptree shows that initial uncertainty can turn into genuine interest: in 2024/25, only 44% of students rated an employer as ‘very or extremely attractive’ before a unique work experience with Uptree, but this jumped to 93% after attending.
Ian Browne, Early Careers, School Engagement and Skills Growth lead at Lloyds Banking Group explained how our partnership has helped his team:
“Evidence shows that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds benefit from targeted and sustained support particularly throughout their final years in school to achieve greater success in landing an apprenticeship or succeeding in selection processes.
“A diverse workforce is an asset, shown to create better solutions for customers. Our work with Uptree has enabled a deliberate, structured and measurable contribution to address the challenges of social mobility.”
Ultimately, early touchpoints, such as career Insight Days during school, are therefore vital for building confidence, developing career readiness, and providing exposure to professional environments. In turn, employers benefit from a stronger pipeline of skilled, high-potential candidates from more diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.
Empowering underrepresented students through engagement metrics
This data should not exist in silo. Engagement metrics such as repeat attendance, content interaction, and follow-up applications reveal how well students connect with your brand beyond the first interaction.
When employers understand where students are building stronger connections with their brands, it can help refine outreach to attract candidates who are more aligned and better prepared. Ultimately, tracking these moments leads to stronger hires, better retention, and more inclusive pipelines.
With Uptree’s user-friendly platform, employers can easily showcase their brands and content to diverse student groups, ensuring seamless engagement and impactful interactions with early careers talent.
This includes digital outreach through monthly newsletters and in-person events like our Work Experience Insight Days. These structured interactions help raise brand awareness and engage students throughout their journeys. Leah’s story highlights how our platform delivers long-term impact, including hires.
Leah was unsure of her career path in Year 12 but eager to explore business and marketing. After attending several Work Experience Insight Days, she gained valuable insights into the advertising industry:
“Receiving the newsletters was very helpful, naturally I was always looking for more work experience to have in my pocket, so I was actively checking the [Uptree] website, but having the newsletter with daily updates and new blogs to read really made me proactive.”
Leah also used Uptree’s digital resources to stay updated on apprenticeship roles and to engage with employers. This ongoing engagement built the confidence she needed to apply early to Publicis Groupe, where she is now a Media Planner at Digitas.
In a full-circle moment, Leah recently returned to Uptree – this time not as a student, but as a professional panelist at an event, inspiring the next generation of Uptree students. Her story reflects the strength of our model in building authentic, long-term relationships between students and employers.
The future of early careers recruitment
Redefining ROI in early careers recruitment, from focusing only on final hires to delivering a holistic student experience, is key to building inclusive, sustainable talent pipelines.
By prioritising engagement quality, linking upskilling to career pathways, and tracking the entire student journey, employers can better address cross-industry skills gaps and make career opportunities more accessible to diverse early careers talent pools.
Our work with employers such as Lloyds Banking Group and Publicis Group shows that integrating student experience into recruitment strategies helps nurture student growth and build confidence before applications are submitted.
At Uptree, we help employers make this shift with event design, student feedback, and strategic outreach. We will continue collaborating with employers and the ISE community to explore how experience-led ROI can not only shape more inclusive talent pipelines but also make industries and brands more accessible to all.