At a university career center, employment agency, or staffing office, you support placement operations — maintaining job-listings databases, coordinating with employers, scheduling interviews, and handling the administrative work behind matching candidates to positions.
Most days run between the employer database and the candidate pipeline — posting jobs, scheduling interviews, fielding employer and candidate calls, processing placement paperwork. You're often the operational layer that lets counselors and placement officers focus on relationships. Placements processed and database accuracy anchor the operating measures.
Where it gets harder is the simultaneous matching across many candidates and many employers — every candidate has constraints and preferences, every employer has specifications, and the placement secretary holds the matchups in working memory across the office's active pipeline. Variance across employers shapes the work: university career centers handle student placements with semester cycles; staffing firms run high-volume commercial placement; specialized agencies run niche markets with deep relationships.
People who do well in this seat tend to be organized in coordination, warm with candidates and employers, and patient with paperwork that ties up placement loose ends. Career-services and HR credentials anchor advancement. The trade-off is the modest pay balanced against the satisfaction of operational work that helps candidates land positions and employers fill seats.
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Where this role sits in the broader career landscape — and where it can take you.
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Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
Roles with similar work and overlapping career paths
View all Admin & Office roles →At a university career center, employment agency, or staffing office, you support placement operations — maintaining job-listings databases, coordinating with employers, scheduling interviews, and handling the administrative work behind matching candidates to positions.
Median pay for a Placement Secretary is about $52K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $38K to $72K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Speaking, Active Listening, Reading Comprehension, Social Perceptiveness, and Writing.
Most people in this role hold a high school diploma.
Employment in this field is projected to grow about 1% through 2034, with roughly 156,260 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Placement Coordinator, Placement Specialist, and Placement Officer.
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