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There is a next-generation college recruiting strategy that is gradually making the traditional approach seem as outdated as phones with wires.

I call this new approach über college recruiting (über is German for superior) because it is so aggressive. This advanced approach began emerging in the late 1990s and was most often associated with high technology firms like Trilogy and Cisco.

The practices were so successful, so exciting, and so out-of-the box that urban legends still abound about what these true innovators were doing over a decade ago. Recently, über recruiting has been re-energized by the antics and the advanced methods of the Google recruiting machine.

Google has adopted the über approach in part because of its use of metrics. Most firms stick with mainstream college recruiting efforts because breaking free of the status quo isn’t easy, as few in the HR world seem willing to take on the challenge and make the business case for something different.

Google, being an organization full of advanced mathematicians, scientists, and engineers took the time to calculate that a top technologist from a graduating class is worth 300 times more than an average grad. When they talk about top technologists, they are not talking about the best who approach their college recruiting booth during a career fair, but rather that one truly unique innovator who may someday change the world. Having calculated the value of such exceptional talent, Google is willing to shift its approach and spend whatever resources are needed to become the #1 college brand. They have championed the über approach because the old traditional approach just can’t guarantee extraordinary hires.

Most Firms Utilize the Traditional Approach

I estimate that 95% of corporate college recruiting programs follow the traditional model because everyone is familiar with it and they are simply comfortable using it. I sometimes call the traditional model the “career center focus” model because it relies so heavily on services offered by the career center, and very little on actual scouting for talent.

The primary steps in the traditional model are simple and straightforward:

1. Pick your top schools in the U.S. and the majors to target.
2. Arrange with the career center dates for information sessions and interviews.
3. Place ads announcing the info session.
4. Develop brochures and recruiting collateral.
5. Offer food that is good enough to attract, and give a compelling talk.
6. Hold on-campus interviews.
7. Make your offers.

It’s straightforward, relatively inexpensive, and it produces enough hires to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, most executives, hiring managers, and recruiters are satisfied with it in part because they are unaware that there are other more advanced options that yield a clear competitive advantage. The advanced college recruiting model contains more sophisticated elements designed to ensure extraordinary results.

A Checklist of the Major Elements of Über College Recruiting

The advanced or über approach contains many elements that are either under-emphasized or completely absent from the traditional approach. The primary distinction between the traditional and über models is the reduced emphasis on campus information sessions and increased focus on branding, technology, relationship building, aggressive marketing, and fact-based decision-making.

If you want to be part of the “elite” 5% that use the advanced approach, here are 9 key elements that make the advanced college recruiting model so powerful:

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Last week, I highlighted the need for corporate college recruiting programs to include referrals by students and others to supplement a firm’s Career Center efforts. Part one covered the advantages that college referral programs provide as well as a few examples of benchmark best practices.

In part 2, I will highlight some of the action steps you can take to implement a successful college referral program including advanced approaches, tools, and some added tips.

If you want to generate a significant portion of your college hires as a result of your referral program, here are a variety of approaches to consider. Select those that fit your level of aggressiveness and corporate culture.

Things to Do

• Offer rewards. Surprisingly, many people associated with a university are willing to make referrals with no promise of a reward. Why? Because they really believe in the abilities of the students they know and work with. You don’t need to give away a flat-screen TV in order to be successful. Students will readily refer with simple rewards like gas cards, iPods, software, movie tickets, a pizza party for their friends, professional sports tickets, or a chance to win a spring-break vacation. Offer students a choice from a list of rewards. It’s best to start small and then increase the rewards if you find those under $100 are ineffective. Since every campus is different, directly asking students or trial and error are the best ways to determine what works. You can also offer campus clubs and student professional organizations larger rewards for successful hires as a result of their referrals. The key is to offer an exciting reward but not one with an economic value so high that it might cause someone embarrassment.
• Referral cards. Referral cards are under-used in both traditional employee programs and in college referral programs. Think of the excitement an individual gets when they’re handed a card that says “WOW, you really impressed me. You’re just the kind of person that would be perfect at XYZ firm!” Referral cards can be electronic (like an e-greeting card) or on paper. It’s important to limit the number you deliver (to make sure the people who get them feel “special”). It is also extremely important that individuals responding to such invitations to apply are not treated identically to applicants walking in off the street.
• Utilize your databases. Use the information you gain from other sources, including scholarships, participation in community events, and working with alumni groups. Data mine the information in order to identify potential referrers.
• Use blogs. Have recent grads and interns (and even college recruiters) write blogs that discuss what it is like to work at your firm. Blogs are an effective way both to attract and “sell” students on your firm. Ask your most successful bloggers to evaluate those that make great comments or ask good questions on their blog and to make referrals if they identify someone special.
• Social networks. Encourage your recent grads, interns, and employees who work in functions that target college grads to be active on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Ask them to build relationships with individuals who show promise.
• Ads, posters, and campus radio. Although they can produce some good referrals, your screening program has to be able to handle a larger volume than when more targeted marketing approaches are utilized.

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Employee referral programs are the most powerful tool in recruiting, routinely producing the highest quality and volume of experienced hires.

Yet for some unexplained reason, most corporate college-hire programs don’t have a referral component.

A few firms have pioneered in the college referral area. For example, the always leading-edge talent team at Intuit has produced amazing results with micro-cash bonuses (over 50% of their hires from one university came from their student referral program).

And Endeca found that Harvard and MIT students were willing to make amazing referrals with the promise of a flat-screen TV as a reward. Bold, but effective!

Not having a referral program as a key element of your college recruiting effort is a missed opportunity because no group of potential candidates are more connected with their peers than college students.

And the stronger the connections, the better referral programs work. Students connect through social networking sites, text messaging, online forums, face-to-face in classrooms, at social events, and in student organizations. If you understand their social connections, it’s relatively easy to develop a formal “college hire referral program” that can supplement your career-center efforts and produce a majority of your intern and college graduate hires.

Think about it, you can have others do more than “half of the work” in college recruiting (by making referrals), which frees up time and resources to focus on the other half.

The Referral Concept

The basic premise of all employee referral programs is that “the very best” know other top individuals. They get to know them because top performers learn from and compare themselves to other top performers. Professionals are constantly talking to each other on the phone, through text messaging, and Internet forums.

Shifting the focus to students, it’s clear that the best students know other top students because they identify them and compete against them in classes. They also meet each other in social situations, in student groups and clubs, in honor societies, and of course, online.

All referral programs work by getting others to share with your recruiters the names of the top individuals that they know. By merely asking or by offering a small incentive, they will likely share these names.

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Part one of this series dealt with the business case of implementing a new college recruiting program aimed at moving the activity out of antiquated gallows of campus career fairs, campus career centers and the like, and into the modern era. This direct approach is aimed at reaching those who know and can influence the truly valuable students who wouldn’t be caught dead in a career resource center.

The proposed approach is one that all but the very best talent acquisition functions scoff at, not because it isn’t possible, but rather because it isn’t easy. Beyond the business case, part one outlined the major players corporate recruiters can leverage on college campuses to reach top talent and detailed the benefits of the approach.

Now, in part two, the attention turns to the steps and activities needed to implement such an approach.

Developing a Formal Relationship-Building Process

Today, if you want to identify top students, build your brand, and “sell” the best students, you need to go beyond the career center and build relationships with the faculty who know and have the ability to influence the decisions of these students. Once your firm makes the decision to build long-term relationships with faculty, the next logical step is to develop a formal process that you can use to build these relationships in many diverse academic programs.

Who Should Have The Relationship?

Although recruiting managers can help develop and manage the overall process, recruiters are not the best ones to build relationships with faculty. Instead, the best people to build the relationship with faculty are your program directors and your hiring managers.

Directors are the first choice because not all individual managers hire graduates every year; however, directors and GMs will likely have some hiring in their organization each year.

Because senior managers are often domain subject experts, they have a better chance of having advanced education in the subject and being considered as “equals” by faculty. They also know the latest jargon, tools, problems, and opportunities. In addition, because senior managers control significant financial resources, faculty often look upon them more favorably because they could potentially offer research support and funding.

Create a Relationship-Building Template

This roadmap can guide the relationship-building process for all managers across the firm. Include the steps to take, the best practices, common errors, and the metrics for assessing the strength and the success of their relationship. The recruiting department should also provide training, advice, and guidance so that individual managers can minimize the time they spend on these recruiting relationships.

The “relationship building map” should support localization, so that the final approach best fits the type of university that you’re targeting (i.e., top-10 schools, other research institutions or teaching institutions, as well as public vs. private schools). Differences should also be allowed for international universities.

Process steps should cover identifying the faculty to target, how to communicate with faculty, and what are the current best practices for getting faculty to play nice. The key here is to utilize multiple approaches and reach school employees and staff who recruit the most influential individuals within their academic program.

Also, develop a macro-level communications process that minimizes the chances of duplicate efforts on individual faculty members and best practice/problem sharing processes among those building relationships. Add metrics in order to demonstrate the success of the process and its ROI.

Finally, put together a “toolkit” of approaches that allows an individual hiring manager to pick and choose from among the many available approaches and techniques. Rather than putting together a strict “program,” offer choices and the opportunity to learn from their successes and mistakes. This allows managers to “own” the relationship-building process, which is the No. 1 critical success factor for relationship-building programs.

Rule #1: Don’t Embarrass the Faculty Member

There is a lot of “emotional baggage” associated with building relationships with faculty. It’s also true that some practices that are fine at some institutions are frowned upon or even banned at others.

In case of doubt, don’t assume; instead, find out. If you try something that creates waves, be prepared to modify your approach so you don’t embarrass the faculty member. In most cases, they can’t be fired but they can catch flak from other jealous or politically opposed faculty members.

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In the United States, students are just beginning to return to campus after the summer holidays. For most organizations, college recruiting will also resume with the timeless routine of information sessions and campus visits for job fairs, interviews, and other related events.

But smart organizations are foregoing the traditional campus activities, in favor of leveraging the Internet. In fact, if you want to attract and hire the best students, forget going to campus at all; it’s not necessary.

College students tell me they are confused by the entire recruiting process. Organizations on the leading-edge of technology are still using the most traditional of methods to recruit them.

While every student has a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile, most companies do not use them in the recruiting process at all. Students are actually a bit surprised that recruiters seem to use recruiting tactics that their parents relate to better than they do. Many are involved in virtual worlds, take online webinars, download lectures as podcasts, and learn from virtual professors. Yet, they must listen to a hiring manager and watch a PowerPoint presentation about some company in a stuffy room on campus.

Unfortunately, recruiters’ belief in the efficacy of past practices is reinforced with surveys by a variety of organizations and institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. But if you take a few minutes to sit down and actually talk to students, you get a different picture of what they would like, what would impress them, and what would engage them.

As demand for college graduates continues to steadily rise, the supply and demand figures for college students should be warning that times have changed.

The number of college students is fairly flat, growing at perhaps 1% a year, and is projected to remain that way for at least another four or five years. Another little-noted fact is that more women than men are enrolled in college and, unfortunately for the high tech and engineering worlds, women don’t tend to major in engineering, mathematics, physics, or computer science. All of these fields are facing significant declines in enrollments and in graduates.

Also consider the students of all age groups graduating from virtual universities that have no campuses. These students are valuable resources for corporations that are currently almost untouched and unrecognized.

Facing these challenges, I don’t see how organizations can focus on just a few campuses or limit their reach to elite schools. Here are a half-dozen tactics to guide your virtual efforts on campus:

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Most university recruiting is pretty dull and ineffective! It takes little to no creativity or imagination to concentrate nearly 100% of a college recruiting effort on the events and activities formally sanctioned by university career centers. While the career event approach has primarily been the modus operandi for decades, it’s an approach seriously out of touch with how students study, live, and play today. In 1950 the best students would line up for nearly any opportunity to wow a potential employer in hopes of securing one of only a few choice jobs, but for students today the opportunities are many and diverse.

You can no longer expect the very best students to be found through career-center-sanctioned activities because the universities and the technographics of their student populations have changed. The increasing popularity of non-traditional academic programs like online degrees, night programs, weekend programs, and international programs, coupled with the fact that many students are now older and working full-time, means that many students just don’t have the opportunity to physically use the career center or even participate in career center events. In addition, the growth of Internet job boards and online career advice websites have eliminated the need for students to work through a tightly controlled process to reach employers who want them.

Today, if you want to identify, build your brand, and “pre-sell” the best students on employment opportunities with your organization, you need to go beyond the career center and build relationships with the faculty who know and have the ability to influence the decisions of college students.

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Who knew that:

• Dartmouth College graduates have the highest median salary in the country with a Total Cash Compensation of $134,000;
• Colorado School of Mines has the highest median salary of all schools west of the Mississippi, excluding California, with a median Total Cash Compensation of $106,000;
• The University of California Berkeley is the state school with the highest Median Total Cash Compensation of $112,000.

These are just a few of the tidbits from the 2008 Education and Salary Report sponsored by Payscale (profile; site).

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Part 2 of a 2-part series

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.

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Part 1 of a 2-part series

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.

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Phong, a smart Vietnamese-American student majoring in accounting, has had three solid job offers this year, and she doesn’t graduate until May. Other students report increased interest from employers who, after many years of relative apathy, are now looking at campus hiring with vigor. Some of these organizations are fearful of losing their baby boomers to retirement and of not having anyone to replace them. Some are just trying to build bench strength as they grow and find that they need more managers than they have. A few are seeking foreign students to hire and then employ back in their home countries.

Because of this interest and the increased competition, it is getting more difficult to attract the best college graduates. Just a few weeks ago, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) released a report entitled “Job Outlook 2008,” which indicates that employers expect to increase college hiring by 16% during 2007-2008. And, this demand is spread across many majors, not just engineering and the sciences, but also for graduates in business, government, accounting, and communications.

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RehabCare, an outsourced provider of physical rehabilitation patient care, has launched a new blog which provides information and communication opportunities to college students and those interested in the rehabilitation profession. In answer to the talent shortage in the allied health profession, the company has been building undergraduate pipelines and actively garnering interest among college students over the last two years. By providing career information and resources for prospective: physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, and other rehabilitation professionals, the company hopes to keep its 10,000 clinician positions filled.

“It’s still too early to say how many people we’ve hired because of the blog,” says Barbara Wallace, assistant VP of Campus Relations for RehabCare. “We went live with the blog in August, and what we have noticed is that we’ve had increased traffic to our Web site and there are more searches being conducted on our job postings.”

Given the technical savvy of today’s college students, Wallace says that creating a blog seemed like a good way to convey the company’s branding and recruiting strategies to Generation Y students.

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Another acquisition in the M&A-happy recruiting field: Taleo has purchased WetFeet Recruiter, an applicant tracking system.

Taleo has transitioned WetFeet customers over to Taleo.

Hawk-like readers may remember that WetFeet Recruiter has been been the subject of buyout predictions (and retractions) before.

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Surveys by Wetfeet and IOMA show that internships are the best way to hire quality college graduates. While few corporations actually track the most effective sources in college recruiting, those that I have worked with have consistently found that quality internship programs produce the highest quality candidates, the most productive hires, and the hires with the highest retention rates.

Unfortunately, many college internship programs are poorly designed, have no or few metrics, are underfunded, and are run by individuals with little knowledge of what separates a great program from the average one.

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September marks the beginning of another year at colleges and universities across the United States. A few days ago, I was at Dartmouth University watching the frantic scramble of groundskeepers, maintenance staff, and academics as they prepare for their 239th school year!

What I also noticed is that free wireless Internet access was everywhere. I was sitting on a bench in the village where the college is located surfing the net with a strong signal. Early returnees were sitting in small groups on lawns and benches and almost every one had a laptop out. Many were wearing their iPod earphones, and I am sure each had a cell phone.

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In part one of this series I highlighted the many reasons why you should include remote college recruiting as part of your college hiring strategy. In part two, I will highlight action steps, tools, and approaches that you can use to identify and sell top college students remotely.

Tools for Virtual College Recruiting (Identifying and Selling)

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As recruiting continues to become more difficult, more and more companies are looking to reinvigorate their college recruiting programs and concentrate a greater percentage of external hiring efforts on entry-level professionals. If you are preparing to go that route, I suggest you look at some of the new approaches that comprise “remote” college recruiting.

Many of these approaches produce three-times the ROI than the resource-intensive traditional approaches used by many. While remote college recruiting may not seem right for you, remember that today’s students are products of the Internet age. They are accustomed to purchasing clothes, setting up dates, paying bills, and reading course materials online.

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As a staffing professional, how many resumes have you reviewed in your career? Hundreds? Thousands? Do you ever find yourself pausing over something in a resume just because it seems strange? I recently found myself doing just that, and it ended up taking me down a very interesting path.

The resume in question was that of an IT professional who was under consideration for a full-time position. I was reviewing the resume when I noticed that, under the Education section, the job-seeker had indicated that he had “matriculated” at a school in Europe, had obtained an IT certification, and had received a B.S. degree in Computer Science.

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Yale University senior Aleksey Vayner, an aspiring investment banker, took the road less traveled when he applied for a position with financial services company UBS. Not only did Vayner toss aside the idea of the formatted one-page resume, he also may have temporarily sidelined the emerging belief that video resumes are a good idea.

Vayner mailed Sheena Sahibdeen at UBS an 11-page resume and seven-minute video, a documentary-style glimpse into what makes him such a great candidate. Along with the traditional listing of educational and extracurricular achievements, the video splices in images of the young man’s abilities in karate, tennis, and ballroom dancing, among other skills.

Vayner never intended for his materials to travel outside of the UBS walls, but this application somehow was leaked and became the e-mail forward du jour to numerous other investment banks and beyond. UBS is allegedly launching an internal investigation to determine how the materials were leaked.

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The value of consulting advice may be in the eye of the person writing the check. But it seems corporate recruiters would be well served to follow the practices of three global management consulting firms that have topped WetFeet’s eighth annual State of Student Recruiting survey.

Some 3,055 undergraduate students and MBAs at top-tier colleges and universities participated in the survey and ranked McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company as their top three choices when it came to evaluating how effectively they recruited during the Spring 2006 campus recruiting cycle.

The students were asked which companies actively recruited them, how they view prospective employers, how they determine which to include on their short list of prospective employers, and which recruiting tactics were most effective.

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In a past article, an amazing number of people weighed-in to trash professional education in favor of practical experience. Some of the commentators supported their position by citing three industry leaders without degrees who lead successful companies; maintaining that recruiting is an art, as well as a serious profession; or, arguing that some ERE authors are unqualified because they have never recruited. I hope the majority of people do not take these comments too seriously. These arguments may sound attractive, but are all seriously wrong-headed - and some are even dangerous.

For example: The “I Know People Who Are Highly Successful Without a Degree” Argument

• As pointed out by one reader, if education is unimportant, why do you suppose smart and successful folks like Gates, Dell, and others insist that their new employees are educated? Education does not make someone successful, but neither does self-imposed ignorance.

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