Business management often argues that recruiters are not presenting the right candidates, and in perfect “hiring hindsight” find fault on the basis of candidate education level, character attributes, work experience, technical skills, compensation, etc.

Recruiters are quick to remind management that they present, but do not select, candidates for hire, and that most employees who leave a position do so because of other issues such as training, compensation, work schedule, promotional opportunity, etc. Recruiting and line managers need to acknowledge a shared responsibility for employee retention, and a shared success when good employees elect to stay and grow with the company.

In the spirit of developing good metrics, here are a few specific questions to help assess how successful a recruiter has been in contributing to retention

Did the recruiter submit a diverse slate of candidates?

One of the best ways recruiters can influence retention early in the hiring process is by presenting a diverse slate of candidates, thereby offering management significant choice when it comes to who they would like to hire. Employee referral programs, while often highly successful, sometimes have the unintended consequence of creating homogenous employee populations with a tendency to leave or switch employers in groups. Diverse employee populations aid in retention by offering a richer employment experience to new hires, simultaneously encouraging a culture of inclusion and innovation through broader perspectives.

Did the candidates submitted fit the job description as it was posted? Did the job posting accurately portray the requirements and qualifications sought in successful candidates?

Both internal and third party recruiters are subject to EEOC regulations and should present the most qualified candidates for an open position, regardless of age, race, gender, etc. So even if a particular hiring manager only wants to see candidates who are Cowboys fans, recruiters must use criteria from job postings when assessing candidate qualifications. Further, most new hires framed their understanding of a particular position based on the job description — and if they start with a flawed premise, it’s often hard to recover. This is especially true if career path, training, or other promises fail to deliver.

Did the recruiter explain the job description, work schedule, general compensation structure, and benefits information to the candidates?

If a telephone screening or recruiter interview is a part of your hiring process, good recruiters will use this time not only to evaluate the candidate, but also to go over the most important details about the position and company. Other recruiters will ask a candidate to prepare before a screening by conducting some research about the company, and then more effectively use their time by filling in the gaps with all of the information about the position that isn’t available online.

For call center positions or those with unique work schedules, candidates sometimes fail to fully grasp requirements such as evening or weekend work, mandatory attendance for training, or lack of flexibility in scheduling (which is sometimes required due to childcare or class schedules for those continuing their education). The more clearly these things are explained on the front side of the hiring process, the better your retention will be because there will be no surprises for your new hires.

Did the recruiter set appropriate expectations with the candidate about the interview, hiring, and onboarding process?

This is a partnership, and recruiters can only give candidates information that they have. Management and recruiters need to communicate closely when there are process or procedural changes that will affect new hires. Interviewing and orientation are highly influential parts of the process as they set the tone for new hires who are still forming their first impressions of your company. Missteps here are often magnified, and gross errors can give the impression that a company doesn’t care, toils under bureaucracy, or is generally ineffectual.

Did the recruiter make himself/herself available to the candidate during the hiring process for any questions or concerns?

In large corporations, often there are teams of individuals who handle pieces of the process such as relocation, employee orientation, benefits, etc. Recruiters and line managers are equally responsible for redirecting candidates to the correct point of contact so that new hires receive necessary information. Entry-level candidates, in particular, often have difficulties navigating through the various departments responsible for ensuring a smooth onboarding experience. The best recruiters will always offer to help and provide resources, recognizing how a good start can contribute to better retention.

Did the recruiter check-in with the candidate after the start date? (This is not always feasible in volume hiring situations, but is a great best practice where possible.)

The biggest employee retention issues often surface within the first couple weeks of employment. Candidates sometimes have not taken down their resumes from job boards or formally ceased their job-seeking activities. Introductions to coworkers, management, and staff begin to uncover personality clashes or stylistic differences. Commutes that seemed like a great idea now become unbearable. While candidate check-ins can’t erase these issues, they can at least help recruiters proactively identify these things in case there is anything management needs to do to prepare for or address.

Human resources and line of business management share responsibility for the successful recruitment and retention of employees. Recruiting functions must educate management as to the role they can play in retention, and must also draw clear lines as to what they cannot impact in results. The better this responsibility can be delineated and shared, the stronger your retention results will be.

In my last article, I talked about the value of relationship-based recruitment in the college arena, and how deepening the bonds with campus contacts and candidates can help any organization be more successful in recruiting. In this piece, I’ll provide specifics as to how you can be more successful at building relationships in the college space.

Capitalize on referrals. We often talk about building a candidate pipeline on campus, referring to branding and attending career fairs, and forgetting that the best method of all is word of mouth. Students consistently cite friends and classmates as the single most influential source when it comes to their job search. So remind your candidates throughout your hiring process that you’re looking for others like them. You’ll be amazed at how many of them begin to refer their friends.

Turn candidates into recruiters. Building relationships with our campus candidates allows us to gain access to a whole network of upcoming grads. Any candidate who has come through a good interview process can speak about the work environment, company culture, management team and philosophy, training, and compensation potential. As a recruiter, it makes my job a lot easier when a candidate has heard about my opportunity from a former recruit, and it adds credibility when I have a small army on campus talking about a great interview process.

Involve new hires. Do a trend analysis of your new hires to see whether they tended to belong to any particular student organizations or clubs. These groups always appreciate knowing that you’ve hired quite a few of their members in the past, and often your new hires can help you gain an audience with a club more quickly than you would be able to on your own without this information.

Identify the influential. When trying to build deeper connections on a college campus, talk to your newest college hires and learn from them which professors and career advisors they would seek advice from again. At some schools, students are actively engaged with career services, and at other schools most of the student population isn’t even aware that there is such a thing. By talking to your new hires, you can determine where to best focus your efforts. Sites like ratemyprofessors.com also give a good indication of which professors students admire and which ones you might wish to avoid when it comes to recruiting. When you reach out to these folks, let them know that your new hires recommended them as people of influence.

Bring out the big guns. Understandably, professors are often inundated by companies that want to recruit their best and brightest, and as a result, some of them choose to steer clear of recruiters altogether. To get the school’s attention, some companies have found success by working with department heads to arrange special breakfast or lunch meetings for faculty senior company executives. Involve only those individuals from your company who can speak to the history, mission, culture, and diverse career opportunities within your organization. Too often, junior recruiters or those less tenured with a company are unable to answer the types of questions posed by faculty, and you want the school to see that you take the relationship seriously enough to involve senior management in recruiting efforts.

Have fun. Not missing a beat, high-tech companies are taking their plight directly to the students, generating buzz by running puzzle, engineering, and programming competitions complete with cool prizes and bragging rights for the winners. But even smaller companies can use this type of tactic if they partner with the right student groups and have a strong marketing message. Companies have an easier time recruiting if their brand exudes an air of energy and fun.

Stay in touch. Once you’ve moved through the hiring process and you have a group of candidates set to start with your company upon graduation (in four to six months), how do you make sure these career explorers stop looking and actually come to work for you. Some companies create an immediate sense of community with their future starts by inviting them to sales rallies, networking events, and conferences or trade shows. For smaller organizations, this can be as simple as personal phone calls or hand-written notes from hiring managers or senior executives to your new hires. These efforts are scalable based on time investment involved, costs, and size of candidate pool.

Employ technology. Most recruiters would admit that we could do a better job of keeping in touch with clients and candidates. Unfortunately, technology still has a long way to go toward making this easier. While the unwieldy process of managing relationships with large groups of candidates has not been perfected yet, some clever ad agencies are certainly helping companies to stay more connected to their candidate pools through formalized marketing campaigns. Many large companies send small gifts, graduation presents, or company giveaways to reinforce a sense of company pride in candidates and their families. One major ad agency created a fun campaign for a large auto manufacturer where e-cards were sent to candidates at regular intervals prior to their start date to keep them warm and get them excited about their upcoming start dates. Another option is to build a password-only microsite for future starts to login and get the latest company information, news on events, and information about contests or profiles of successful hires.

The most successful companies recruiting on campus are evaluating and addressing every phase in the recruiting process, from initial contact to onboarding, making it clear that competition continues to be fierce in hiring the best college graduates.

The companies that come out on top will be those that continue to evolve and adapt their hiring methods utilizing relationship-based best practices.

Almost 10 years ago, when I took my first job in recruiting (third-party search), I read on my new employer’s website: “The difference is in the way we manage relationships.”

At the time, I suppose I thought it was a nice marketing line or one of those great company mission statements that companies use but never live. Sure, we manage relationships. I guess I hadn’t been in the business long enough then to fully comprehend how that might be possible because I was only thinking in terms of filling job orders.

I used to watch as the owner of the company spent endless hours on the phone with executives from all sorts of different companies, and talking about the most random things. He talked with one candidate about how she enjoyed Qi Jong, with another about the joys of piloting small planes, and listened intently as another candidate complained about how frustrated he was with his career at a Fortune 100 company.

All the while I was plugging away, sourcing for my open reqs and wondering how he could afford to spend so much time talking about nothing with so many people.

“Don’t think about the money,” he used to say. Easy for him, I thought. He’s the owner of the company, and I’m still making sure the rent is paid.

Sometimes he’d go for months without placing a single candidate and then suddenly he’d get a huge search worth six figures, and as if by magic he already knew exactly who he should be talking to in order to fill the role. Because he had spent the time building relationships, he had a huge network of contacts he could draw from when the time came. He was sourcing before he ever received a job order, and clients always returned to him because they could count on the fact that his database was filled with all the right names.

And each of his contacts was someone with whom he had already established trust, the kind of thing transactional recruiters struggle with constantly. Back then, I just didn’t get it. If you wait until you have a job order to source, you’re already too late.

Now that I’ve moved into college recruiting, I realize how similar it is to executive search, and I find myself coming back to that phrase time and again: “The difference is in the way we manage relationships.”

So many companies go to campus as a transaction: attend career fairs, post the job, hire the best of the bunch. Even best-in-class companies go only a step or two beyond this, but the end goal is always a short-term requirement to get Y number of hires. And the benefits of relationship-building quickly go out the window when candidates and contacts see this as your only focus.

Truth is, there are two kinds of recruiters: transactional recruiters and relationship recruiters. Early in my career, I spoke the words but didn’t fully understand what it meant and what it took to successfully manage relationships in recruiting.

It’s easy to just source, fill a job, and move on; for some types of recruiting, I’m sure this model works. I’m sure lots of college recruiters across the country find the transactional model useful, as you only place an entry-level candidate once. But when you can step back from viewing candidates as placements, the benefits of the relationship-building model are clear.

As a college recruiter, too much focus on filling specific requisitions often results in missing a great candidate pool.  For example, many hiring managers indicate a preference for Business or Finance majors, when in fact someone with a Liberal Arts degree would also do well in the role.

Don’t be afraid to challenge assumptions about what is required to be successful in a given position, and encourage your managers to be open to all majors. But when you do reach out to this group, be ready for a different kind of conversation.

Maybe it’s the fact that everything has gone online and students are moving away from actually walking into their Career Services office. Or maybe it’s the failed promise made to Gen X and Y that we could do anything we set our minds to. A lot of college candidates are very lost when it comes to what they want to do when they graduate, and despite the abundance of helpful information at their fingertips, it’s not getting any better.

Some have taken a job in their majors only to find that they hated it; others have no idea what options are open to them given their course of study.

The good news is that today’s graduates are exploring, looking at a very wide variety of career opportunities across many fields. The bad news is, you may have to be their tour guide.

Transactional recruiters tend to pass through the sea of lost students rather quickly, saying, “If they don’t know what they want, I can’t help them.”

And it’s hard when you’re busy trying to fill reqs to see the logic in spending time talking with a large number of candidates who may not meet your requirements. In these circumstances, the best companies will hold Information Sessions or Open Houses to speak to larger groups of candidates and address general questions about the company or job opportunities.

Regardless of where you engage with a candidate, talk more generally about their passions, motivations, and career aspirations rather than immediately focusing on filling a specific job requirement. Sometimes it turns out that you’ll have a position of interest to them, and other times they do some soul-searching and realize they’re looking for something completely different. ‘

The candidate might be able to be successful in sales, but if she is truly excited by forestry or law enforcement, she’s probably not going to stay in the role very long once another opportunity presents itself. Of course, not everyone gets to work in their chosen field, and sometimes our college hires need a little time out in “the real world” before they can settle into a career that wasn’t exactly what they were planning.

Either way, spending a little extra time with the candidate on the front end can help better inform your hiring decisions and improve your company’s retention. Worst-case scenario, you’ll have a nice chat and the candidate walks away with a good feeling about your company, whether or not they ever work for you.

Too often, campus recruiters who focus too much on marketing specific job opportunities miss the opportunity to ask for referrals, delve deeper into student organizations, and learn more about people of influence on campus.

Once I spoke with a journalism major who was passionate about reporting on the inequities in public education and immigration issues. She absolutely lit up when she was talking about the things she had been uncovering through her reporting. While she wouldn’t have been interested in any of my open positions, I learned that she was heavily involved in several major student organizations on campus.

In the 10 minutes I spent talking with this candidate, I got quite a few tips on how best to engage with those student groups. At the end of our conversation, she even offered to introduce me to other key group leaders to kick-start my efforts.

As it turns out, building relationships and maintaining a strong pipeline of candidates involves a lot of talking about nothing.

Editor’s note: Check out part 2 tomorrow, which will explore specifics to become more successful at building relationships in the college space.