Snow College

About Snow College

Snow College, founded in 1888 by Utah pioneers, is a public community college with campuses located in Ephraim and Richfield, Utah, and a learning center in Nephi, Utah. It offers certificates and associate degrees along with bachelor's degrees in music, software engineering, and nursing. Serving more than 5,600 students, the college is committed to helping students graduate debt-free, gain resume-worthy experience, and develop a plan for the future. The affordable price and personalized environment full of opportunities allow students who find Snow College to find themselves.

The Challenge

Snow College had long been a small community campus with a big challenge: providing the best possible career preparation to nearly half of its students — those entering directly into the job market each year. Serving rural counties where community and family resources are scarce, Snow College administrators and instructors have historically borne a particular responsibility for their students' guidance. Yet, the College had no resources for providing career counseling — until 2012, when its Career Center was established. The next challenge was to find an effective, low-cost way for the Career Center to offer interview practice and coaching without further demands on its small staff.

The Solution

Powerful Resource for Administrators

In 2018, Snow College Career Center Director Lisa Laird and her staff attended a demonstration of the StandOut® AI-enhanced video interview practice system. “We were impressed by how easy to use and intuitive the StandOut platform was,” Laird says. “We saw how we could easily implement it as a teaching tool in our Career Decisions course, and how students could use it independently for interview practice and feedback. We knew this kind of convenience and flexibility would remove a huge burden from our Career Center.”

Convenient and Scalable Classroom Tool

Snow College launched StandOut on its campus shortly after that 2018 demo, providing the software to instructors as a classroom tool, and offering it to students for mock interview practice. Once it proved to be a boon to the College's Career Decision Course, the system was then incorporated into other courses, such as Business and Cosmetology, for professional and sales skills development. All practice interviews can be saved and shared with course instructors for individual feedback. Now, StandOut is helping the College's BS degree candidates in Software Engineering to develop their job interviewing skills with advice from their course instructors. And students in the English as a Second Language Certification Program are finding the system's AI feedback invaluable for practicing and improving their English pronunciation as well as for interview preparation. According to Laird, instructors report they appreciate how convenient and intuitive StandOut is. They especially like how it allows them to create their own questions and interview assignments for their students, or simply select from the platform's large library of questions. Laird and her Career Center staff appreciate how StandOut supports them by empowering instructors to create practice interviews and provide feedback to their students.

Effective Mock Interview Prep for Students

StandOut has also been transformative for the success of Snow College's on-campus career development events. The College brings local employers to campus to stage in-person mock interviews with students earning degrees in Nursing and Natural Resources. The mock interviews provide students a real-life interview experience while offering employers the opportunity to meet potential candidates without the pressure to offer employment. The students practice with StandOut in advance of their live interviews. According to Laird, students report that practicing with StandOut helps them feel prepared and relaxed in an interview setting. And most of these students receive job offers as a direct result of those campus interviews. Students also report that they like StandOut's easy, intuitive interface. And they like the broad choice of career fields and interview questions. But they're especially enthusiastic about the AI-generated feedback, which provides immediate insight into speech clarity, tone, grammar, and word choice, in addition to improving the content of their responses, with tips specific to each student's selected job field.

Conclusion

“Having StandOut on our campus has relieved a major burden from our Career Center,” Laird says. “We never had the staffing to do 1,300 interviews each year. StandOut facilitates an important partnership between our staff and faculty who are willing to take on the role of reviewer and work with students in their classrooms. It’s been lovely as a small career center to be able to work with faculty on student outcomes. It has also been a great experience working with CollegeNET. Their customer service is outstanding! Our StandOut support person, Thomas, is so responsive and incredibly patient. We can always rely on him to jump in and help students with any issues.”

Want to Know More?

To discuss how StandOut AI video technology can improve career services, campus hiring, and admissions interviewing on your campus, schedule a demo: