Why Career Centers Are Choosing Advize Over Candid Career
- emilymcsherry2023
- Aug 16
- 9 min read
If you're researching video-based career exploration platforms, you've probably come across Candid Career (now owned by uConnect). They're the closest thing to Advize when it comes to recorded informational interviews, but that's about it. In fact, we respect what they built over the past decade.
But that's about where the similarities end.
As the team behind Advize, we get asked constantly: "How are you different from Candid Career?" It's a fair question, and one we're happy to answer transparently. If you're evaluating platforms for your career center, here are the key differences that might influence your decision.
Let's Start With What We Both Do Well
Both Advize and Candid Career believe in the power of authentic professional voices from alumni and professionals. We both understand that there's incredible value in bridging the gap—lifting the curtain on what jobs are really like and giving students access to real information at scale that would otherwise be very difficult for them to capture and understand.
This foundation matters. Getting authentic insights from working professionals is transformative for students who might never have access to these networks otherwise. We give Candid Career credit for pioneering this space and proving that students hunger for this kind of genuine career intelligence.
Where We've Taken a Different Path
Modern Content for Modern Students
Candid Career's library was primarily built pre-COVID with longer-form, unstructured interviews. While comprehensive, this format doesn't align with how today's students actually consume content.
We built Advize for the TikTok generation—think YouTube Shorts meets career exploration—but we keep clips slightly longer to reflect real interview questions and answers, which means students naturally pick up how to interview like professionals without even realizing it. Our average video is 1 minute and 45 seconds, auto-played at 1.25x speed based on student feedback. We even use AI to pull out keywords and quotes from the video to enhance the watching experience (pictured below with Brandon Kline, alumnus of California State University-Sacramento).
For example, let's say a student thinks they want to be a consultant. When they hear someone from McKinsey & Company (like Jacqueline Pageau below, alumna of UCLA Anderson School of Management and Queen's University), Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) answer "What skills are important for a job like yours?", they're not just learning about consulting—they're learning how to hold themselves and communicate like "a real consultant from a top firm" through natural copycat behavior while discovering what consulting actually entails. Our modern format and design allow students to learn what could take over 20 hours of manual work in just 5 minutes.
But it goes beyond interview preparation. Students report that our videos increase their confidence and teach them what questions to ask people while networking. They're learning to have real, in-person networking conversations because they've heard professionals discuss these topics authentically.
As one freshman student shared: "Watching the videos helped me feel better prepared for real networking conversations."
Our 10,000+ short-form videos create this multi-layered learning experience: career exploration meets unconscious interview preparation meets networking confidence.
The Standardization Advantage
Here's where we see the biggest practical difference. Candid Career's interviews cover random topics at different points in each video and it's unclear what information is going to be covered when a student "clicks" the video (see below). If a student wants to understand investment banking or healthcare, or marketing, they'd need to scroll through three separate lengthy videos, hunting for relevant information.
We developed the "Advize 13"—a standardized set of questions tested with student focus groups at top universities. But let us explain how we created this framework: while in business school at UCLA Anderson School of Management, we analyzed about 20 comprehensive coffee chat and networking guides posted on career center websites that explained what questions students should be asking during networking calls. We found similarities across the guides from the pros (you), bucketed the questions, and trimmed them down to these 13 core questions. We then led surveys and focus groups with hundreds of students at UCLA —from undergraduate to graduate students—and confirmed these questions addressed the core parts of an informational interview for any career.
This approach was informed by our CEO's background as a Learning and Development professional in the recruitment industry at one of the top public recruitment agencies in the world, Michael Page, where she trained hundreds of recruiters to become market experts about different careers and fields quickly and effectively. The method? Have recruiters talk to people in the careers they're recruiting for—such as HR—and ask very straightforward, open-ended questions on every call, like "Can you walk me through your responsibilities?" The professionals are the experts; the recruiters became experts by talking and learning from people and understanding what they really do. That's what we help students do - and it's a critically missed learning opportunity in career exploration today.
We leverage the learning power of hearing the same question answered by multiple people in the same field—it's like listening to a podcast about entrepreneurs and hearing their stories and advice over and over again. You pick up clear learnings and patterns versus just having one-off advice, which makes insights more sound and actionable.
This leverages proven cognitive psychology principles: when learners hear the same concept expressed repeatedly by different people, the varied encoding strengthens recall and helps the brain identify core patterns across different contexts. Additionally, hearing multiple professionals validate the same insights builds confidence and makes it easier for students to find someone whose communication style and story (or "vibe", as the students tell us) resonates with them.
This is a proven learning strategy in the recruitment industry that's been used by the best firms in the world, who have tens of thousands of recruiters who all specialize in different careers.
So, we applied these concepts and took it further with our playlist feature. When students want to explore "What is the day in the life of an investment banking professional," we create curated playlists where multiple professionals answer this exact same question.
Here's what makes this powerful: we measure students' understanding and confidence about the topic before they start watching, then again after they complete the playlist on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being no understanding to 5 being deep understanding. When you use Advize, your students will increase their career confidence and learning by 35% or more—guaranteed from our thousands of students who have used Advize to date. That's measurable career learning impact, not just video consumption.
With Candid Career—or any video-based career learning platform—you just watch videos. No learning outcomes. No metrics. We provide the missing piece: measurable impact.
One MBA student put it perfectly: "I realize I didn't know what a Product Manager really did until I watched these videos."
AI-Powered Discovery vs. Manual Search
Candid Career relies on traditional search functionality. Their professionals on video are not tagged with personal details such as school, majors, or identity markers, making targeted discovery challenging.
See Advize alumni Angel of Stanford University Department of Computer Science, W. P. Carey School of Business – Arizona State University and Notre Dame Law School video here with tags:
See Candid Career video below without tags (serious question... who is this person? 👀):
We've also built AI recommendation technology, similar to Netflix or YouTube, recommending content based on interests and engagement data. Students can type in what they are studying or want to study by major, select industries of interest, and even type into an open chat (pictured below), which we run across our content using AI to recommend the most relevant playlists for them. Plus, students can uniquely sort professional content by identities and traits such as first generation, veteran, student athlete, or even their own alumni.
This is powerful because it not only helps them envision and be inspired about being in a specific career—they see a potential version of themselves. It helps plant dreams and inspires in a way that connects on a deeper level.
As students tell us: "Talking to people in this career seems less daunting and possible to achieve now that I was able to hear the stories from Advize" and "I am now very curious about exploring this career after watching the videos."
Assignment Tools That Actually Work
This is where career center leaders see the biggest operational difference. Candid Career offers basic video access but no assignment functionality.
Here's the problem with just having a content library: students are inundated with content - a link to a video library gets lost in the noise of everything from TikTok to YouTube to class. Result: you pay for something students are not using! Our assignment tool helps educators bridge the gap and meet students where they are—we help market to students digitally, nudge them toward what's good for them, and ease the pain of having "yet another tool they need to learn about." We help you bring it to students without complex integration or onboarding that takes less than 24 hours. We do not collect student data or integrate with systems that require advanced technology review or approval from your institution.
Teachers or career teams can create assignments with full customization based on their specific student groups and learning goals. You're the expert, we just give you a tool to design what you need as you see fit, while recommending the most used prompts requested by our partners. A popular problem and solution example we see: "We want to engage students early and start thinking about careers at scale. We have a small team and need students to start thinking about their career sooner. We don't want to tell them what to learn or explore, but we want them to learn from at least 3 people in careers they're interested in and watch at least 30 minutes of videos." With an easy copy and paste, every student can receive a link to an assignment like this:
Reflection questions are part of the assignment—fully customizable questions that students fill out after watching the videos, which the career team can then see answers to. Questions like "Why did you watch the videos that you did?" or "What did you learn that you can apply to in-person coffee chats/networking?" (pictured below).
This provides a digital solution to get students engaged in the number one way they consume content—video—while giving career centers valuable data about student interests at scale, broken down by watch time and most searched terms, and nudging students to "talk about their results with their career coach" to increase engagement (pictured below).
This is an especially important feature to encourage partnerships with teachers to bring career to the classroom. According to an Industry Survey (CFA Institute, 2025), 44% of students report turning to professors for career advice. From the faculty perspective, 92% of faculty report being asked for career advice by students within their disciplinary area in the past year. We help you tap into where students naturally seek advice and turn those faculty conversations into pathways to your career center.
Real Customization vs. One-Size-Fits-All
Most schools using Candid Career get the same video library regardless of their specific needs.
For our more elevated, customized partnerships, we create curated content libraries for each institution, featuring your alumni and reflecting your campus brand. For example, for our partner ASU - W. P. Carey School of Business we sourced and created over 600 video clips featuring only their alumni, who we also asked, "What was your most impactful experience at W.P. Carey?" as well as "What advice would you give a current international student to be successful in their career?" to any alumni who were international students. This provides an extra layer of customization that no one else offers. But here's what really sets us apart: we hire and pay a student intern from your university, as part of our Career Content Internship Program, to represent your school while interviewing your alumni. We train them on how to source alumni and conduct interviews (aka, they get paid to network), providing a white-glove experience for alumni engagement and a priceless professional development opportunity for the student.
During our process interviewing alumni, we even ask them if they are okay with and open to students reaching out to them for live calls. For those that say yes (which is 90%+), we place a badge on their profile and their LinkedIn link so students can reach out to them directly (pictured below, Anthony Walker, University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University, College of Business Administration alumnus).
What Career Center Leaders Tell Us
Everyone we've talked to who is familiar with both platforms has 100% agreed that we are a "better Candid Career." The feedback is consistent: students engage more, educators get better tools, and the platform feels built for today's educational environment rather than yesterday's.
Why This Comparison Matters
We're not here to disparage Candid Career—they served an important role in proving that video-based career guidance works. But just like career services has evolved over the past decade, the tools we use need to evolve too. Helping students with their careers is more complicated and challenging than ever and students deserve the best tools to get ahead.
The question isn't whether video content helps students (it does). The question is whether you're using a platform designed for how students learn and engage today.
Ready to See the Difference?
Here's something else that sets us apart: we believe in our platform so much that we offer a new freemium model. You can get a school login and try Advize for free— now including our assignment tool at no cost to align with our mission of getting career guidance into as many hands as possible.
Let's figure out how to get an impactful, no-cost tool in your hands to help you and your students this year. Why wouldn't you? Book a 30-minute demo with our CEO today to see how Advize can increase student engagement and give your team the tools you need to measure impact. Why wait another whole academic year to implement proven innovation with impact for your students?
Because at the end of the day, your students deserve career guidance that meets them where they are—not where they were five years ago.
Written by Emily McSherry, Founder & CEO
Ready to explore how Advize can transform your career center? Let's schedule that demo and dive into what's possible for your students.
Schedule with Emily here: https://calendly.com/emily-advizehub/30min
