Andrea Lowe
City of Seattle, Student Programs

Great post. Companies should continue building their brands on campus even in this economy to ensure a steady pipeline of talent for future. Top talent will be harder to source in the future for yet another reason. An increasing number of jobs require a college degree and that means there will be more and more jobs chasing college graduates.

As a former sales strategist at Automatic Data Processing (ADP), I worked on talent initiatives including developing a sales hiring profile based on an assessment of key factors that were correlated with sales productivity and tenure. Companies should consider examining their historical data to drive their sourcing strategies and investments. When it comes to campus recruiting, companies should evaluate schools regularly to determine where their top talent is coming from and what their top talent looks like. This can help them spend their campus recruiting dollars wisely, and ultimately compete better by hiring the right talent.

Vikram Gundoju
gundoju@saleswilling.com
http://www.SalesWilling.com

My work there included discovering (via internal company surveys, questionnaires (to current employees), focus group meetings (i.e., new employee orientations sessions and existing employees) and teasing out the Employment Brand of the huge Ag global giant, Monsanto. Find out this bit of information and then ”bottle” it, live it and market this employment brand (via your website, new employee orientation, internal employee celebrations, marketing brochures, etc.)–and then watch how your offer to accept ratio improves for new hires as well as and your retention numbers.

Also, important to a firm’s ability to sustain their Employment Brand is the implicit link it has with being an “Employer of Choice”. My work at Monsanto over those years linked the two for them. We found that employees had a very high regard for Monsanto and their work at Monsanto; we also noticed how new hires were beating a path to our “website” door (website traffic exploded), as it were. This was confirmed when Monsanto won the granddaddy of all HR Awards, “Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for”® list in 2004 and 2005; I led Monsanto’s successful application process for those years.

As you mentioned, on University Recruiting, Companies need to be consistent in their University Recruiting, year in-year out—good economy or bad. Career Center professionals, Faculty and students will remember if you “bailed” out on the Fall or Spring recruiting cycle; even if you have zero student openings that season/cycle, continue the University Recruiting effort! Use it as a time for establishing a stronger campus brand. Go there, do the Career Fair and meet with student groups, Advisors, Faculty, and Career Center professional.

Again, thanks for a great article.
Kind Regards

Thanks for the very relevant article. I wanted to also point out that a campus recruiting program can be expanded to some key campuses that are not open to traditional recruiting events: The United States Service Academies (West Point, Annapolis, etc.)

These institutions produce some of the most sought-after performers in civilian life (after they have finished their term of service). For hiring managers / campus recruiters not familiar with this talent pool, one way they can be efficiently sourced is by utilizing a military recruiting firm who helps these job seekers prepare for the military-to-civilian transition (e.g., the company I work for, http://www.Bradley-Morris.com ).

Here is a recent article in US News and World Report regarding these candidates: http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/best-leaders/2008/11/19/americas-best-leaders-us-junior-officers-military.html .