AI’s role in the hiring process has become a major one—for better and worse. This has not been lost on universities.
Most college career centers have been employing artificial intelligence created by outside vendors to help students accomplish such tasks as polishing résumés and prepping for interviews. As of April, 86% of U.S. schools of higher education reported using AI when working with individual students on their job searches, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). But Dartmouth College is taking a different approach.
Dartmouth has hired a chief product officer, the only job of its kind at an Ivy League institution, to build proprietary, in-house AI tools for students and alumni seeking career assistance. The center’s new AI product, in development, aims to engage with students throughout their time on campus, asking them questions regularly about their interests, skills, and desires that will, ideally, result in a targeted and successful job search when it’s time to graduate.
“We’ve been delivering the same darn product forever,” says Joe Catrino, executive director of the Dartmouth Center for Career Design, referring to the usual college career office offering. That’s what Kiley McEvoy, a former Google senior product manager and a Dartmouth alum, is here as chief product officer to change.
This makes Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth’s home, an unlikely vector in the current fights over not only the role of AI in hiring processes (for both employers and applicants) but also the role of the tech on college campuses. Just a few months ago, undergraduates booed commencement speakers who dared to bring up AI. How will students respond to an AI designed to assess their aptitudes and preferences intimately? And if this works, will college career services change forever?
Third-party AI tools have become commonplace among U.S. colleges’ career services.
For example, around two summers ago, Danielle Marriner, assistant director for career services training at University of Wisconsin-Madison, began hearing “rumblings” about how students were using AI in their career development. “We knew students would probably be using it,” she says. So the school strategized ways it “could be helpful in that conversation.” That led to the development of UW-Madison’s AI Career Toolkit: a set of resources that includes technology from third-party vendors like Microsoft Copilot and Gemini. It also features access to Handshake, which connects qualified candidates with potential employers (though Handshake has pivoted to focus on the market for specialists willing to train AI) and two tools created by the career coach Pamela Skillings, Big Interview and Big Resume. They let students practice interviews and helps them improve their CVs.
Yale, New York University, Rutgers, Harvard, and Cornell, to name a few, have Big Interview and Big Resume on hand, while the University of Florida’s Career Connections Center promises to ready students for AI in the workforce by preparing them “with AI tools in the curriculum.” Many schools—including the University of Texas, Georgia State, and Columbia University—offer students VMock, an AI-powered, career-focused platform that gives tips on job applications.
“About 11% [of colleges] say they have an AI chatbot in the career center,” says Mary Gatta, NACE’s director of research and public policy.
Dartmouth’s AI products, on the other hand, will be built within the college’s own walled garden, and in a way that’s more personalized to individual students. They will, in a sense, perform the work of a career counselor: helping students discover which types of roles might suit them, instead of homing in on writing stellar résumés and acing interviews, like many vendors’ AI tools do.
Dartmouth’s AI product will consist of a single platform with features focused on job seeking, alumni networking, interview prep, and making personalized career choices. One aspect of the kit will invite students to answer questions about their interests and motivations, says Catrino at the career design center. Given that information, the AI will provide 12 careers that might be a good fit.
In addition to having students input basic information like their majors and skills, the platform will also ask more granular questions—such questions as what courses or even specific lectures most piqued students’ interest, and what types of learning worked best for them in class. Students using the AI platform will be able to “log all of those insights as they have them,” says McEvoy, the chief product officer, with the platform pushing messages to users requesting continuous inputs to build out their profiles. From there, it should be able to offer more tailored career ideas to its users. (Dartmouth would not provide specific examples of outputs, perhaps because the tool still hasn’t been finished or used.)
Those profiles will also be accessible to Dartmouth’s career coaches. “Now, instead of walking into a meeting with a coach cold, both the student and the coach are starting that meeting with a lot of background,” McEvoy says. “That interaction is significantly leveled up with that additional data.”
Another goal of Dartmouth’s career-focused AI products will be to match students with alumni who have relevant proclivities and experience, since alums will be able to enter detailed information into the platform too.
“That’s where AI is going to help us find those nuanced overlaps,” and potentially draw in alumni, McEvoy says. “They’re going to be really excited and interested because they already have this connection point [with the student].”
McEvoy acknowledges that the platform will have to be especially engaging to encourage alumni to get involved. “You can’t just hammer alumni and say, ‘Hey, please do this,’” he says. “They need to have some reward from it, as well.”
For that reason, McEvoy plans to orient the tool to alumni who are evolving in their own careers. By entering their own data points, they should be able to get feedback on, say, midcareer pivots. “That’s how we’ll have even more insights and data to benefit undergrads,” he says. Of course, McEvoy’s not planning to ignore the basic skills that products like Big Resume focus on. “We’re going to have to provide students with tools that can package and demonstrate [their skills] in a way that feels authentic to employers,” he says.
He acknowledges that he’s not yet sure what that product will look like, but he knows it too will involve AI.
Before coming to Dartmouth’s Center for Career Design, McEvoy worked at the education technology company Quizlet for seven years. During his time there, he got to witness the shift in what generations expect from AI platforms. While older users felt more comfortable using AI to help pull in search results, which they’d still have to weed through, younger users expected more immediate answers to their queries.
“As we build our platform,” he says, “we’ll want to deliver that.”
But when students expect instant answers from AI, they might rely on those answers too heavily—an issue that comes up when people let AI write their résumés instead of using their own voice.
Having served as a hiring manager at Quizlet, McEvoy’s seen this play out.
“In the past six months, I was flooded with résumés that perfectly matched the job description,” he says. But when he spoke with candidates, their expertise didn’t line up with those résumés. AI had written them.
At Dartmouth, he hopes the process of regularly engaging with the AI platform he’s building will get students used to recognizing and communicating their true strengths. On the other side of the coin, student anxiety, distaste, and mistrust around AI abound, making it hard to envision those students letting the technology further into their job searches.
At UW-Madison, Marriner says student skepticism of AI—mostly focused on environmental and privacy concerns—resulted in mixed reception of their career center’s AI Career Toolkit. As of June 2026, however, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports nearly half of graduating seniors used AI in their job searches.
While the conversation about using AI in college career centers continues, there don’t appear to be other colleges spinning up proprietary tools like Dartmouth, though, as NACE’s Gatta notes, career centers’ use of AI is changing rapidly. Marriner, for one, says she doesn’t see UW-Madison coming up with its own in-house AI products. Focusing on helping students tell their stories in their own voices, she says, is the priority over building products that could assist.
The goal for McEvoy, meanwhile, is for Dartmouth’s product to help students tell their stories to AI, so it can help them find the jobs they’ll like best. McEvoy says something like that could have benefited him throughout the first decade or so of his career as a product manager.
“I initially gravitated towards things that were flashy and getting a lot of press, like Google Glass. Those actually weren’t the jobs that gave me the greatest career satisfaction or where I was leveraging my skills,” he says. He then worked on less-hyped projects, like search engine quality and Medicare, which he loved. “Unfortunately for me,” he says, he was more than a decade into his career when he had that realization.
“Ideally, I could have been leaving Dartmouth knowing that.”