A job search tool for university students that works between appointments
Careers advisers are not short of good advice to give. What they are short of is a way to keep a student's search active between appointments. FirstPost monitors employer career pages and public job boards, then filters each student's daily alert to the criteria they set.
The short version
FirstPost is a personalised job alert service. A student sets their job titles, industries, seniority, work arrangement and location, or uploads a CV and lets those fields be suggested for them. FirstPost checks over 200,000 companies across employer career pages and more than 25 national and public job boards, then sends an alert when new roles match. A careers service can issue students access codes that grant a period of free Pro with no card required, and students revert to a free plan afterwards rather than losing access.
Three problems this actually solves
"I found it the day it closed"
Students often check job boards in bursts around deadlines and assessments. A daily alert keeps the search running between those checks and shows them roles found since the previous email.
"I don't know what to search for"
This is the single most common blocker in a first graduate search, and it is not solved by a better search box. A student can upload their CV and have job titles suggested from what is actually in it, which gives an adviser something concrete to work with in the next session.
"There's too much and it's all irrelevant"
A mainstream board optimises for engagement, so a student sees sponsored roles, wrong-level roles and roles in the wrong city. A filtered daily digest is a much smaller thing to face at 8am in final year.
Where it fits alongside what you already run
FirstPost is not a careers management system and does not try to be one. It does not book appointments, run events, host employer profiles or track outcomes. It sits underneath all of that as the part your students use on their own, on the days they are not talking to you.
| Your careers service does | FirstPost does |
|---|---|
| Appointments, guidance, CV and application review | Surfaces live vacancies matching each student's own criteria |
| Employer relationships, fairs and campus events | Monitors those employers' career pages continuously |
| Your curated vacancy board and targeted opportunities | Covers the long tail of employers no single institution can curate |
| Outcomes reporting and graduate destinations | Nothing. Individual student activity stays with the student |
Getting it to students
Most careers services start with a small free batch of codes, put them in front of one cohort or one society, and see whether students actually keep opening the emails. If they do, we agree a funded pilot for a defined cohort and period, with a review at the end. Codes can be single use, one per student, or shared with a redemption cap so a single code can go in a handbook, an induction slide or a cohort email.
We built FirstPost after graduating from Plymouth, so this particular problem is not abstract to us. If you would like to try it with a group of students, tell us roughly how many and we will sort the codes.
Frequently asked questions
A useful tool for a student is one that monitors employers between the times they remember to check. FirstPost monitors over 200,000 companies across employer career pages and more than 25 national and public job boards, then emails each student when new roles match their chosen titles, industries, seniority, work arrangement and location. Students can upload a CV to suggest those preferences when they do not yet know what to call the job they want.
The careers service is issued a batch of access codes. Each code grants a student a set period of free Pro when they redeem it at signup, with no card and no payment details. Codes can be single use, one per student, or shared with a cap on total redemptions so they can be printed in a handbook or included in a cohort email.
Yes, when the employer advertises them on a career page or public job board FirstPost monitors. Some placement and graduate vacancies may reach students before a larger aggregator lists them. Students can also filter by seniority so early careers roles are prioritised over senior ones.
Not at individual level. A student's searches, CV, matches and applications are their own personal data and are not shared with the institution that issued their code. What we can share is cohort-level reporting: how many codes have been redeemed, and how students are answering the check-in that appears in their alert emails, which runs from "not great" through to "I got a job". For a careers service that needs an outcome measure rather than surveillance, that aggregate is usually the more useful number anyway.
They keep their account and revert automatically to the free Starter plan, which continues to send daily alerts on a smaller monitored set with no card required. This matters for careers services with a duty to alumni, because support does not end abruptly at a renewal date.
No. FirstPost does not sell personal data, does not take fees from employers and does not pass student details to recruiters. It is funded by subscriptions. Students apply on the employer's own site.