Yet recruiting source representatives say they rarely hear from corporate recruiters, only receiving infrequent calls when a recruiter needs to fill an immediate opening.

Says Bev Principal, assistant director of student employment services at the Stanford University Career Development Center: “If I meet with a company representative during the summer, and receive information about its entire breadth of career opportunities, not just the immediate openings, I can pass that information along to students during career counseling sessions or I’ll remember to invite that company to participate in specific career events here on campus.”

Principal says she regularly e-mails students about recruiting events, and sends a monthly newsletter to engineering students. If she has information to share about an employer or its job opportunities, she passes it along.

John Weitzel, internship coordinator at El Camino College, says that employers are often disappointed in student turnout when they schedule a last-minute campus recruiting event. He starts promoting the retail holiday job fair, for example, when students first return to school in mid-August, and companies like FedEx and Disney set up campus recruiting visits a year in advance. FedEx is on the students’ radar screens because it recruits on campus every Monday.

“Not every student knows what they want to do when they finish school,” says Weitzel. “If I know Northrop Grumman has jobs other than engineering, like grant-writing and marketing, I can talk about those opportunities with students who seem suited for those careers.”

Even sources that provide experienced candidates can be better used through proactive planning. Olin King, site manager for the West Covina office of the California Employment Development Department, says that employees who lose their jobs due to offshoring receive special benefits and retraining, and he can sway them toward specific courses — if he knows local employers have hiring needs.

“We can set-up recruitment sessions, where we’ll line up the candidates and employers can come to our office to interview,” says King. “There are opportunities for employers to provide career advice to 300 experienced workers at our older and wiser seminars, which cater to job seekers 40 and older. We also bring education and employers together to fulfill specific needs in the community, but the only way to do that is through collaboration, and I just don’t hear from corporate recruiters.”

While you might have heard speculation to the contrary, they continue to innovate, particularly in the area of employment branding, where they maintain global dominance. Several years ago, I wrote a broad case study on Google recruiting that highlighted its overall approach, but I didn’t go into any depth about the company’s bold approaches in the area of college recruiting.

In this article, I’ll highlight some of the creative things that Google has tried in college recruiting, including its latest triumph, the amazing Google College Ambassador Program. (If you missed the original case study, or would like to revisit it, you can find it here.)

The King of Employment Branding

The recent collapse of the banking and financial markets has subdued much of the consulting and investment banking competition that Google once faced on campuses. Despite some turbulence, the high-tech industry is still a shining light in this economy, and Google is by far most students’ number-one choice of employers among high-tech firms.

Recent research reveals that 45% of engineering students would like to work at Google. Even outside of high-tech, Google’s employment brand still shines. It was recently selected as the number-one ideal employer among all undergraduate students by Universum. In their most recent study, 17% of the students participating selected Google, up from 13% last year. Those leads will undoubtedly be lengthened next year following the implementation of their new and innovative College Ambassador Program.

The Google College Ambassador Program

The number-one weakness of all college recruiting programs is their inability to maintain a “continuous presence” on campuses throughout the academic year. Every firm is forced by travel expenses and a finite supply of recruiters to limit the number of days they can have a recruiter on any particular campus.

Because of the cost, recruiters typically fly in, spend a few days, and then fly out. As a result of this “here today gone tomorrow” approach, some college recruiters have even been labeled “seagulls” because they are viewed as “flying in frequently, dropping a load of crap, and then leaving.”

Even Google has realized that it cannot afford to park its recruiting staff on every key campus for enough days during the year to really make a difference. As a result, they developed an “on-campus ambassador” program that I predict will soon be copied by many other major firms.

The premise is simple. Instead of periodically flying in representatives, why not recruit individuals who are already there (students) and convert them into ambassadors?

These on-campus ambassadors or representatives can then act on the firm’s behalf every day they are on campus. They can put together events and generally help spread the word about Google as a great place to work.

Some of the benefits of this “ambassador” approach include:

• Credibility. Because ambassadors are students themselves, what they say is more credible and believable to other students. This allows them to effectively spread both goodwill and recruiting- and product-related information.
• Knowledge of the campus. Because they have been enrolled at the school for years, they know the school’s culture and the best communication mechanisms.
• Enthusiasm. By recruiting enthusiastic students, the firm has an opportunity to take advantage of their energy, enthusiasm, and extensive social networks. Obviously, this enthusiasm could be picked up by other students and it would likely spill over to their work representing Google.
• Low-cost. Because the Google product and employment brand are so strong, students are willing to volunteer their time just for the opportunity to work with Google. Ambassadors will be given a small budget for expenses, communications, and events that they must operate within. They also get to share in the free food at Google events or what Google provides during exams. They also get free Google gear, numerous contacts at Google, and an opportunity to put “serving in a leadership role” for Google on their resume.
• Relationship building. Because they already regularly interact with faculty, presidents of student organizations, and other students, these “reps” can quickly build relationships and influence others far better than any time-crunched recruiter.
• Educating Googlers. These campus ambassadors also serve as a direct point of contact for Google teams. In their liaison role, ambassadors can advise Google employees and recruiters about their unique campus culture and the interests and needs of their fellow students, which are of course, different at every campus.

The program gives the firm an expanded campus presence and an immediate competitive advantage over Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM (though QUALCOMM pioneered this concept).

I predict the program will get thousands of applicants and it will significantly further Google’s lead in building its college employment and product brands, but only time will tell.

16 Other Google College Recruiting Innovations

Google’s College Ambassador Program is just the latest in a string of what can only be called “bold and outside the box” approaches that Google has utilized over the years. College recruiting is a field that can be characterized as almost universally bland and one dominated by a “follow the leader” strategy.

Google stands out because it uses an array of tools and approaches, including:

1. Google games. Google is famous for holding competitions between noted schools (including Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard). Often these competitions include Lego games because Google’s founders are fond of them because they once used Lego bricks as the external expandable casing for one of their early hard drives. Even today, they can be found all around the Googleplex.
2. Billboards. Google used highway billboards that included a math “brain teaser” to excite and eventually recruit math majors.
3. Contests. Google is clearly the #1 firm in using external contests to get ideas and to recruit and assess potential candidates. Their worldwide “CodeJams” are PR magnets as well as being extremely successful candidate and idea generators. Other Google contests have included Google Space, Android, and its famous “Summer of Code” which received over 7,000 applicants this year.
4. Focus on high school students. The best college recruiting starts early in order to capture the loyalty of young minds before other firms have a chance. Google’s “Highly Open Participation Contest” demonstrated Google’s support for the “open source” concept. It also received extensive PR and it successfully involved over 400 high school students this year.
5. Pizza during exams. Google championed the concept of giving free food and pizza at major universities during final exams. The message to students is clear: “we think like you and we understand your needs, so here is free food when you need it the most.”
6. Green recruiting. Google is committed to its green employer brand and demonstrates its deep commitment to sustainability (i.e., solar panels on its headquarter’s roof, its free WiFi shuttles, free bike repair, its subsidy of employee-purchased hybrids, its focus on electric cars).
7. A fun place to work. It’s easy to find stories on the Internet about Google’s “fun” practices. They include free food, pajama day, movie day, martini blowouts, bring your dog to work, and most important, its “20% free time.” Google even made fun of the ubiquitous “aptitude tests” that all college students have to endure when it developed GLAT. Which is a humorous takeoff on aptitude tests put together by Google Labs. Their “testing on the toilet” even makes on the job learning stand out from the traditional.
8. The value of top talent. Google leads the way in “Topgrading,” the practice of trying to hire 100% “A” players. This focus is partially driven by their bold move in quantifying the value of recruiting and retaining top talent (one top-notch engineer is worth “300 times or more” than the average).
9. CEO and founder talks at campus events. Google is among the handful of firms that have calculated the recruiting value of having senior executive speak on campus. Google also encourages employees to give talks at student professional organizations and to bring real Google problems into the classroom (a Google manager visits my management class each semester).
10. Practical training classes on-campus. Google has designed and supported actual courses related to “cloud computing” that become part of the curriculum offerings in order to educate as well as to attract and assess college students (Internet scale program).
11. Blogs. Google excels at encouraging its employees to blog. These blogs make learning and asking questions about Google products and recruiting much easier.
12. Videos for recruiting. Google has created some of the most powerful and most watched recruiting videos.
13. Faculty relationships. Google hires a large number of PhDs (on the premise that they enjoy exploring areas that no one else has explored). To accomplish this, they have developed a network of direct relationships with several hundred professors at major schools.
14. Campus buildings. Google placed buildings and staff on or near college campuses (i.e., Michigan and ASU) to improve their campus visibility. This “expensive to copy” practice also provides both students and faculty with the opportunity to work directly with Googlers and on Google projects during the regular school year.
15. Friends of Google. This tool creates an electronic email network of people who are interested in Google and its products (but not necessarily interested in working for the company). By signing up these individuals and then periodically sending them emails about the firm’s products and events, Google can build a relationship with thousands of people.
16. Internships. Google has an outstanding internship program that hires hundreds of interns each year. The program has an excellent conversion rate to permanent hires. Interns in Mountain View can hang around with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during the company’s regular Friday evening fireside chats. They can also participate in bowling nights, scavenger hunts in San Francisco, ice cream socials, and bay cruises. Interns also get to hear free on-site talks by various business and Internet icons.

Still Room for Improvement

Eventually, even Google’s vaunted recruiting machine will be challenged by Facebook or some other aspiring firm managed by individuals who are also passionate about recruiting. So, if Google is to maintain its dominance, it can’t be complacent.

Instead, it needs to work on some areas that are still weak within college recruiting. Those areas that need improvement include “remote” college recruiting, a formal student referral program, better college metrics, and a more focused approach on new technologies that can be applied to recruiting like social networking, texting, wikis, and video games as recruiting tools.

Final Thoughts

If you think fancier posters, glossier brochures, or better pizza at information sessions will work, think again. These approaches are “so last year,” and only a few firms (E&Y, Enterprise, Qualcomm, and Intuit come to mind) have even attempted to move beyond the traditional into more exciting and productive strategies and approaches to college recruiting.

If you’re not among these elite firms in college recruiting, now is the opportune time to ramp up recruiting on campus because the economy has demoralized the competition. Don’t let the down economy distract you; instead, use Google’s boldness to inspire you to greatness!

In order, the best are:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Australia
4. Germany
5. Canada
6. Japan
7. France
8. Netherlands
9. South Korea
10. Sweden
11. Switzerland
12. Italy
13. Belgium
14. New Zealand
15. China

Also ranked: individual colleges and universities, with Harvard and Yale on top, and Johns Hopkins, Duke, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, and small-but-very-rigorous Caltech also ranked high, among others. Lesser-known schools in the top 100: University of California-Davis, and Case Western Reserve, in Ohio.

Moving up in the rankings: Wash-U in St. Louis; University of California-Santa Barbara; University of Virginia; and Stony Brook, among others.

Back to the country rankings — QS says its “innovative methodology avoids the pitfalls of ranking nations simply according to the number of universities those nations have in the top 200.”

Instead, its comparison uses the number of universities in the top 500; how good a country’s system is at getting students into internationally reputable universities (calculated by taking each country’s number of full-time equivalent students at the top 500 universities, factored against its population); a score based on the position of the top institution in each country; and extra points for having high-performing schools compared with the country’s GDP.

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:

1. Data-driven decisions. Under the advanced recruiting model, decisions are made based on data and facts rather than emotion or past practice. Which schools to target and what majors you focus on changes each year based on previous year performance measures. Recruiting tools and approaches like sourcing and advertising are selected based on the superior numbers they produce. Metrics also tell you in which jobs and with what individual managers new hires should be placed in order to produce the highest overall ROI.
2. A written strategy and plan. It’s difficult to have a strategic impact using a haphazard approach. Unlike the traditional model, the advanced approach requires that you have a written strategic plan to focus and direct your recruiting effort. Rather than using the campus career center focused approach, the über approach uses one or more of five possible approaches including:
   • Relationship recruiting. This strategy focuses on building relationships with “insiders” including faculty, students, alumni and staff. The strategy works because when you build long-term relationships with individuals that the students know and trust, these individuals will help you in identifying and selling top students on your firm.
   • Remote recruiting. This strategy is designed to allow a firm to “cherry pick” the very best students from a number of universities without having to actually physically visit each one. The remote recruiting approach emphasizes the use of technology, the Internet and social networks to identify and assess college talent remotely.
   • Continuous graduate recruiting. This strategy is a long-term approach that focuses on “continuous recruiting” long after the top students have graduated. One element of this strategy is the “delayed recruiting approach” where you identify the best while they’re in college but you “wait” until your targeted college grads “stabilize” and are trained by another organization for two years prior to recruiting them. Other firms utilize this continuous recruiting approach because they are unattractive to college grads and can’t successfully compete on campus. However as grads mature, they might learn to consider the firm for their 2nd or 3rd job. Working closely with alumni associations is another key element in this approach.
   • Off-cycle recruiting. This strategy emphasizes the “over-hiring” of top college grads during slack periods when there is little competition. This is an excellent approach for firms that can’t successfully compete for the high quality grads during most years but can “clean up” when there is little or no competition in down years.
   • Global impact strategy. This approach emphasizes developing the capability to recruit the very best 1-3 students from every top school located around the world. The strategy uses a combination of remote Internet recruiting methods and traditional approaches using corporate staff located in key countries to identify and assess the best in every country that produces top students. Each of the available approaches must “flex” to meet the changing supply and demand of college hires. As competition for grads increases, it is essential that your strategy “scale up” to meet the increased aggressiveness and competition. When no one is recruiting, the strategy should scale back to save resources.
3. Clear and measurable goals. Goals help everyone understand what they are working toward. Most traditional college efforts have simplistic goals like hire five interns and six EE majors. However, the goals of an advanced college recruiting program might include dominating the college market and getting a disproportionate number of exceptional students; building and maintaining a measurable competitive advantage in recruiting; building an employment brand that makes every targeted college student aware of your firm; the global capability to attract the best from every country around the world; and to win every “head to head” fight with our talent competitors over top targets.
4. Employment brand. In advanced recruiting, your external image as a “great place to work” is the cornerstone of the approach. Executing a formal plan to become an “employer of choice,” so that every college kid has heard of you and wants to know more about you, is the most critical element of advanced college recruiting. Google is the model to follow when it comes to employment branding. Key elements of college branding include winning “best place to work” awards, placing on the “best place to start a career” list, being written up for your best practices in media that your targeted students read, having executives speak on campus, and scoring high on the Universum employer brand ranking when compared to others in your industry.
5. Identifying top students to target. Advanced recruiting dramatically expands the number of available approaches for identifying top students by adding a comprehensive Internet component. Traditionally, students were identified through scholarships, and assessment of those who attended your information sessions. Advanced identification tools include the use of student and grad assistant referrals, online and on-campus contests, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and online forums. Other advanced sourcing approaches include using campus professional clubs and honor society meetings to identify talent and having interns act as on-campus recruiting ambassadors.
6. Convincing top students to apply. Advanced recruiting puts a lot of emphasis on having multiple “selling” approaches. These selling approaches are designed to get students to take the specific action of formally applying for a position on your website or signing up for campus interviews. Some of the advanced approaches that firms can use to get their message out to college students include blogs written by recruiters and employees, podcasts that highlight best points, and providing information to parents so they also encourage their child to apply. Other advanced ideas: compelling videos on your website or YouTube, texting recruiting messages, video games, encouragement from other students making referrals, and a separate corporate careers page that is designed specifically to WOW college students.
7. Assessing their capabilities. The most traditional aspect of the “traditional approach” to recruiting are the face-to-face interviews that are scheduled through the Career Center. The advanced approach varies in that it also develops a process that allows you to interview students off campus. Additional features might include computerized online assessment, online Internet interviews, and using contests to assess. The most effective assessment process, on-the-job assessment, can occur during internships and by offering students short-term projects that they can complete remotely during college breaks.
8. Making compelling offers. You can’t classify your approach to college recruiting as advanced unless you use some aggressive approaches. The foundation of the advanced approach is identifying each target’s “job acceptance criteria” and then tailoring the job offer so that best meets each of the criteria. Another approach on an advanced level are offers and direct calls from senior executives and recent hires at your firm to encourage them to accept.
9. Metrics for improvement. Most traditional and knowledge recruiting systems are “dumb” because they don’t learn from bad hires and immediate turnover. Key college recruiting metrics should include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, the overall quality of the candidates, the percentage of diversity hires, new hire performance on the job, and 1-, 2- and 5-year retention rates.

Final Thoughts

There is a growing chasm between the corporate Directors of College Recruiting who live in an “unchanging world” and those who realize there are now many more exciting approaches and strategies available to them.

Shifting your approach is even more necessary because the way that college students communicate with each other and outsiders is changing rapidly. The growth of the Internet and new technologies now allow college recruiting to do things that just weren’t possible before. I hope this “checklist” has helped you assess your current program and understand what you need to do to transition into über college recruiting.

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.

• Global referrals. If your college recruiters are Internet-savvy and well traveled, you will find that it’s possible to set up basic referral programs at universities around the globe, without ever visiting them. The office of international programs at international universities might even be aware of and be willing to make referrals from among their crop of U.S. students who are currently studying as part of an exchange program. This allows you to get students with foreign experience and no visa issues that other U.S. firms are likely to miss.
• Referrals at student conferences. It’s wise to send a recruiter to student conferences in order to make contacts and get referrals.
• Ask for referrals from other schools. Don’t restrict referrals to students from the same school. Instead ask them for the names of students they know who are good at other name universities.
• Collaborate with other college recruiters. Where appropriate, consider making informal agreements with other recruiters who visit your campuses to “trade” non-competing referrals from majors that “their” firm isn’t targeting but yours is. For example, in the case where one firm is recruiting only engineers and your firm is recruiting writers, both firms agree to make a referral should they run across a great student in the other firm’s recruiting target area. Obviously, no cash bonus should be offered in this case where both firms benefit.

Approach These People for Referrals

• Approach grad assistants. The most successful college intern referral effort that I’ve ever encountered in my research received a phenomenal 100% success rate by asking the grad assistants of a few top professors to make referrals from the undergraduate students they had worked with. Grad assistants are easy to find, well-connected, and willing to make referrals, often without a reward. In addition, a simple call to the department office can identify them. In addition, one firm I know successfully recruited them remotely, without ever meeting them face-to-face.
• Approach officers of student organizations. Other than grad assistants, no one is likely to know the very best students better than the student president of an honor society or an elite professionally oriented student club. Student organizations are easy to find without visiting campus because they are affiliated with student government. In addition, most have webpages that list their officers and contact numbers.
• Approach honor societies. Referrals from officers and members are likely to be of higher quality than other student groups. Also ask award winners to refer other students.
• Ask your recent college hires. Obviously, recent graduates will still know and be in contact with some current students. Ask them on the first day of onboarding to provide you with referral names and to help you in convincing the targeted student to apply.
• Approach interns as referral sources. Make it a standard part of your internship program to ask students to make three to five referrals during their internship. Also consider making them “ambassadors” for the firm when they return to campus. While on campus, ask them to make one or two referrals each month. Even using former interns (who chose not to return) as referral sources can yield a few top referrals.
• Ask references to make referrals. You might be surprised to find that the references of exceptional students, when asked, also turn out to know one to three additional students who are also likely to be exceptional. To take advantage of this phenomenon, make a list of those who referred the very best and make them a permanent part of your college referral process.
• During conversations with exceptional students. Whenever you find a really exceptional student, find a way to make it part of the conversation, email exchange, or interview to ask them to identify and refer a handful of other exceptional students. Because they compete against each other in labs and classes, they will know the best of the best.
• During conversations with diverse students. Diverse and international students can feel somewhat isolated from the rest of the university community. As a result they tend to stick together and share the same networks. Take advantage of this closeness, while simultaneously improving your diversity recruiting results by utilizing referrals. The key is to educate a few leaders in each community about the inclusiveness of your firm and the success that diverse and international student hires have had there. Use your current diverse and international employees as mentors and relationship builders. Once the relationships are strong, show your contacts how they can help themselves and their community by becoming a permanent part of your referral process.
• Use current employees. Your employees with kids at top schools are likely to meet some of their children’s friends during visits and school breaks. Take advantage of these contacts and encourage your employees to make a few “exceptional” referrals. Consider allowing your employees to make one referral from among their own children if they are currently enrolled in a targeted major at a targeted school. If you know of any of your employees who teach or volunteer at targeted universities, make them part of your referral effort.
• Ask high school counselors. Some firms start identifying talent early in their academic life. If you go this route, ask counselors at top high schools to give you names of their top students. Then build relationships with them as they move through college.
• Ask community college faculty and counselors. Build relationships with these students as they go on to other schools. Often community college faculty are less reluctant to make referrals because an immediate job is really being offered.
• Employees using educational reimbursement. Ask employees who are taking advantage of your educational reimbursement at targeted schools to make a few outstanding referrals.
• Night and virtual students. At some schools, a significant portion of the student body is not on campus during most Career Center hours. However, in my experience, both night and virtual students form academic and social networks at least as tight as those formed by traditional students.
• Approach faculty. Part-time lecturers and adjunct faculty generally have full-time “regular” jobs, and as a result, they are less likely to be fully aware of the services offered by the Career Center. In my experience, they are more likely to be willing to refer individual students directly to a firm than traditional tenured faculty. If you can build a relationship with them, ask if they would consider referring one or two students a year. Some tenured faculty will not make direct referrals, but some will (I do). Ask them to identify super students who might not appear on the “radar screen” of the traditional Career Center hiring process. Especially focus on faculty who already have some relationship with your firm. Some faculty are not comfortable making formal referrals, but if you ask them directly to “name your best student,” they will give you the name without hesitation.
• Alumni groups. Recent grads who are part of the Alumni association can be asked to refer current students they know.
• Administrative staff. Outside of “top 10″ schools and in low-demand majors, where the competition is not so intense, you will find that many staff employees are eager to help the students they know get an internship or job placement opportunity. If you find a university where that is the case, work with internship coordinators, tutoring coordinators, or the director of the computer or science labs.

Final Thoughts

If you are not fiercely competitive, you might initially resist the concept of student referrals just because you, or no one in HR, had ever heard of them before. But don’t let that stop you.

If you have concerns about the propriety of referrals, remember that students are not university employees and they are free to make referrals and even to accept gifts (like free pizza at your information sessions). If you use a referral program, you are not precluded from interviewing referred students through the traditional Career Center process.

Any concern about doing something new and bold will fade rapidly when you find, like other firms have, that college hire referral programs work almost immediately and they produce amazing results.

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.

In the case of most employee referral programs, the identification is made by your employees. In the college recruiting variation, you contact a broader array of individuals (students, faculty, and alumni) in order to compile a list of the very best. Because college students are relatively poor, it takes a much smaller incentive to get them to refer other top students.

The Advantages

Placing a significant portion of your college hiring effort into a referral program has some key benefits and advantages over relying 100% on the traditional Career Center approach. Some of these benefits include:

• Quality. Referral programs routinely produce the highest-quality candidates and new-hires. Top-quality college students are relatively easy to identify by those in the campus community because college life is performance-based. Students are constantly graded and ranked in professional programs. There are numerous awards and honors programs to recognize these individuals. And you can easily find them in the most advanced classes with the most difficult professors. As a result, if you design your college referral program correctly, it will target and accept referrals only from students and individuals who are likely to know top performers.
• Costs. Having someone else do your name identification and recruiting saves on expensive recruiter time. And because students typically expect little in return for referring their peers, effective referral bonuses can be as little as $50 or a free iPod (make sure to provide a choice of rewards to choose from to meet different student needs). If you have a strong employment brand on campus, getting student referrals is even easier.
• Remote capabilities. Most Career Center recruiting requires a campus visit. In direct contrast, most of the student referral process can be carried out electronically. This means you can identify top students at a lower cost.
• Assessment. In addition to generating names, college referrals add an additional level of assessment. This assessment may include the students’ fit with the corporation, their ability to work in teams, their leadership potential, their interest level, and their willingness to relocate. By having other students do some pre-assessment, you can end up with a candidate pool that is closer to your needs.
• Selling. Students who already know of and think highly of your firm will help your recruiting efforts by helping to convince or sell the targeted individual that your firm is a top opportunity. Peer encouragement increases the chances that top individuals will come to information sessions, apply for positions, and come to your interviews and plant visits.

Be Responsive

The key to any successful referral program is responsiveness, so treat your best referrals like they are gold.

If for any reason you fail to respond rapidly and to communicate often, you will forever “kill” referrals from your frustrated referrers.

The best way to ensure that you have the necessary time and resources for responding rapidly is to limit the volume of “average” referrals. You don’t want to clog your referral program with a high volume of students you could have found using other sources and who have little chance of ever getting hired.

To generate a small number of high-quality referrals:

• Restrict the number of referrals. Restrict the number of referrals you accept from any one individual to a handful each semester; after all, you are targeting the “cream of the crop” and need to limit referrals to truly exceptional individuals.
• Make the skill sets clear. Use detailed position summaries so that everyone who is considering making a potential referral knows precisely what you’re looking for and more important, what you are not seeking.
• Target your referrers. Rather than spamming the campus and asking everyone to refer, target your campaign toward individuals who have a higher likelihood of making quality referrals. If you have the capability, send “targeted invitations to refer” only to those individuals on a campus who you know by name or title. These students are likely to know the right candidates. This group of “targeted referrers” might include faculty, teaching assistants, heads of student groups, key administrators, and senior and honors students. Finally, when you use posters or websites that notify a large population that you are seeking referrals, be sure that these referrals are “coded” (Attn: Mary Sue or a separate webpage). This is so that your recruiters will know that these referrals are likely to be of a mixed quality.
• Avoid “they approached you” referrals. In traditional employee referral programs, it’s not unusual for a majority of the referrals to come from individuals who were “approached” by a relative stranger and asked if you would make this person a referral. I call these types of referrals “they approached you” or “stranger” referrals. The same “stranger referral” problem can occur in student referral programs when the student that “approached you” is not well-known by the potential referrer. These unwanted referrals can be minimized by telling your potential referrers up front that you don’t want them to make these types of referrals. Ask the person making the referral to answer how long they have known them; whether they have known them in a professional context; and what they know about the person’s specific skills and experience.
• Assess previous referrals. After final hiring decisions are made, identify which referrals turned out to be the best. In the future, you can weigh referrals from the best individuals and in contrast, limit or downgrade the referrals from individuals or groups with a bad track-record.

Next week in part 2, look for advanced approaches and tips for generating great college referrals.

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.

Some of the approaches, tools, and techniques that I recommend for consideration in your “relationship building” toolkit are listed below broken into two categories: approaches that require no money and approaches that require a budget.

20 Relationship-Building Approaches That Don’t Require Money

1. Comment on their articles. Everyone likes praise, so commenting on a faculty member’s latest work, presentation, or article will get you bonus points. Utilize the Google “alert” process and Google “scholar” to identify when they have received exposure.
2. Read their blog. Some faculty members have blogs, personal webpages, or electronic newsletters. Subscribe to their RSS feeds and comment on their work.
3. Utilize social networks. Some faculty have profiles on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Encourage your employees to visit their profiles and periodically communicate with them.
4. Co-author with them. Almost any faculty member needs help in publishing, so offering to provide a co-author on a paper or a presentation can help build the technical relationship.
5. Offer to speak in their classes. Many professors want to expose their students to the “real world,” so offering to speak in their classes is a great way to start the relationship. As you build a relationship, offer to provide their students with a “real” problem and then agree to come in as an evaluator. Eventually, offer to “co-teach” a class with them.
6. Attend academic meetings. Not many professionals attend academic meetings but it’s an excellent place to identify top researchers and to build relationships. Consider speaking at these events. Sponsoring academic meetings and events at those meetings can increase your exposure.
7. Attend alumni events. Attend alumni social events in which faculty frequently attend.
8. Mentors. Offer new faculty the opportunity to have one of your staff mentor them in their research and consulting. This mentorship can be particularly powerful if the faculty member is diverse or is from another country. Also offer to “connect them” with other important people in the industry.
9. Access to data. Give them access to corporate data that can be directly used in their research. If they don’t have to collect huge amounts of “new” data, they will get more articles published and they will learn to appreciate you.
10. Corporate intranet access. Where corporate policies allow, provide them access to parts of your corporate intranet so they can learn more about you. The more they know about your firm and its best practices, the more likely that they will use your firm as an in-class example or assign your company to students as a case to study for its best practices.
11. Feedback. One of the best ways to involve people is to ask them for feedback on the technical education and training that you provide your employees. In addition, offer to provide faculty members with your guidance on what you believe should be covered in their curriculum.
12. Be active on Internet forums. Some academic disciplines have online forums or listservers that connect distant academics. Having your employees post questions and answers on these forums can help you begin individual relationships.
13. Not-for-profit organizations. Many faculty members are active in their community. So encouraging employees from your “local” office or facility to serve on some of the same community groups can help you begin the relationship.
14. Offer access to technical training. Provide them with the opportunity to attend your corporate technical training classes or the opportunity to utilize your technical library. This provides you with opportunities to interact with them and to help them in their career.
15. Utilize their former students. If you hire one of the faculty member’s previous students or grad assistants, let them know it. Over time, use these new hires that might enjoy keeping in touch with their “old prof” to help build the firm’s relationship with them.
16. Testers. Provide them with samples of your prototypes or new products and ask them to evaluate them for you.
17. Advisory board. Put them on your product advisory board to build a relationship. Or, put them on your college recruiting advisory board and use those interactions to build a relationship and to understand them better.
18. Show them you trust them. Few things build confidence faster than informally “guaranteeing” that you will at least interview their top five students. Some faculty want to showcase their talented students, while others like to “reward” their top students with exposure to the best job opportunities. Don’t promise jobs, just interview opportunities.
19. Invite them to sports events. Don’t do anything extravagant, but occasionally offering to share seats with them (using corporate tickets) can provide time for lengthy discussions.
20. Access to software. Often, corporate-wide licenses for business and technical software allow firms to provide copies (or access to software) to selected faculty members at little or no out-of-pocket cost.

18 Approaches That Require Budget Dollars

Most faculty face tight academic budgets and in addition, they often survive on low salaries, so providing them with resources or extra pay is often welcomed. In the cases where you provide direct economic value to the faculty member, check with the faculty member or their dean to ensure that what you offer is acceptable:

1. Summer faculty internships. The best way to get to know them and vice versa is to hire them during the summer as a faculty intern. Funding summer projects through the University is another possibility.
2. Fund assistants. Rather than offering direct payment, consider funding a graduate assistant for the best professors.
3. Hire interns. Regularly hiring their best not graduating students as interns will certainly get their attention. You will get increased exposure as the interns “talk up” your firm after they return the next academic year.
4. Offer to teach. A “can’t miss” approach to building relationships with the entire faculty is to offer some of your staff to teach technical classes (pro bono). Having your employees teach provides numerous opportunities to get known and to understand faculty needs and interests.
5. Off-time hires. Hire them or offer research support for regular faculty and lecturers during semester breaks, summers or when allowable, while they are on sabbatical. Also consider hiring recently retired faculty and use them to build relationships. You can also involve them in the design of your college recruiting program and in the selection of “target” faculty and universities.
6. Research grants. Offer them small research or equipment grants through the university to help fund their work.
7. Participate in a case study. Some faculty receive recognition for publishing academic cases. If your firm has some best practices, offer to be the subject of a case study that they write up and publish. Case studies take some time and in-depth research, so the process almost assures a long-term relationship.
8. Trips. Offer to fund a trip or conference during the summer or during the academic year when their rules allow it.
9. Sponsor student groups. Sponsor or fund student groups that they are involved in and speak at their meetings to get exposure. Don’t forget honor societies and any organization that they serve as a faculty advisor.
10. Field trips. Offer to fund field trips to your facility for their class, student group, or their best students.
11. Discounts. Give them and/or their students product discounts on your products or provide product samples.
12. Invite them to conferences. Invite them to attend your firm’s conferences or industry conferences and trade shows. This allows them to “stay current” and it gives you an opportunity to interact with them and to show them around.
13. Hire them as consultants. Many faculty are allowed to work one day each week as consultants.
14. Hire their grad assistants. Faculty can get very close to the grad assistants, so hiring them when they graduate is a not-so-subtle way to continue that relationship.
15. Buy their book. If they have published technical or professional books, buy multiple copies of their book through them.
16. Products in the bookstore. Faculty members frequently spend a lot of time in the campus bookstore. Increase the chances that they will be familiar with your products by displaying them in the campus bookstore.
17. Write articles for journals that they edit. If a faculty member is on the editorial board of the journal, writing an article for the journal can be a first step in building a relationship.
18. Hire a family member. By offering to hire the spouse of new faculty members, you give yourself an inside track on building the relationship, while simultaneously providing much-needed financial support to new faculty. Provide them with meaningful work, and be assured that your firm will be discussed at the dinner table. Another option is to hire their kids for part-time or summer jobs.

Common Errors

Typical mistakes that college recruiting managers make when they design a relationship-building program include:

• Infrequent contacts. Avoid contacting the faculty member only when you need something or right before you begin hiring each semester.
• Selecting the wrong faculty. Do your research to avoid a relationship with a faculty member who doesn’t know the types of students you are looking for.
• Failing to use metrics. Because college recruiting is often cut back during lean times (which can kill your relationships), college recruiting needs to develop metrics and a convincing business case to show the significant economic value added by recruiting higher-quality students.
• A lack of continuity. Because college recruiting managers tend to have a very short tenure, it is critical to develop written plans and guides to ensure a smooth transition between administrations.
• Risk-averse. Any time you go around the career center, you risk the wrath of their staff (some can be whiny people). Dealing directly with faculty will also draw many “that’s not ethical” accusations. As a result, be willing to take some bold risks and some heat, if you expect bold results.
• Not competitive. You must enter into the relationship-building process realizing up front that college recruiting is incredibly competitive. As a result, if you try something new and it works, expect everyone to copy it almost immediately. This means that if you want to be the best over the long haul, you must continually build obsolescence and change into your relationship building process.

Final Thoughts

It’s not a universal rule, but generally, the best and brightest minds and those seeking to learn technology go to college. If over the long-term, you need a significant number of top innovators and technologists, you simply can’t ignore college recruiting.

Because every other firm knows this, if you’re going to attract the best and brightest from competitive schools, you need to have an approach that provides you with a distinct competitive advantage.

There are other competitive advantages to consider including excelling at “remote” college recruiting, starting recruiting early in their academic careers, and utilizing contests to recruit, but the most effective long-term strategy is building faculty relationships. You already do it with your best potential customers and your best potential experienced hires, so now is the time to do it also with the key faculty that know and can help influence the top college talent that you are targeting.

Finally, it takes courage to ignore the naysayers. Ignore them, because most come from the “old school” approach to college recruiting, which is rapidly dying in this Internet age.

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:

• Tactic #1: Become student-centered, not campus-centered. Create an employment brand specifically for students. Your goal should be to attract any student, from anywhere who has the skills and major you are looking for. Why focus on a handful of campuses when the Internet allows you to reach all of them?
• Tactic #2: Use social networks. Create a Facebook, MySpace, or other social network presence. KPMG in South Africa and IBM have created Facebook profiles that demonstrate what can be done to build interest and connect with students. And this is just the beginning of what is possible. By leveraging a customized Ning site, for example, you could create a network where students could invite other students and generate a viral marketing program for recruiting.
• Tactic #3. Create a dynamic, energetic, and exciting website geared to college students. This should be designed to inform and entertain a potential hire. It should allow you to gather enough information about the student so you can decide whether a face-to-face interview is in order. These websites should have video tours of your organizations, interviews about the positions you are hiring for, and lots of diverse information about why a student would want to work for you. These sites can also contain screening tools and allow students to build a profile or link you to their Facebook or other profile. Use the money you save by not going to campus to pay for this website. Combined with a social network presence, this can largely replace any need to go to campus.
• Tactic #4. Build a relationship virtually. Once you have connected with a student, use email, SMS, Twitter, or some combination of these to keep the student informed about your organization and also about the positions you have available and any other details about the recruiting process. Frequent Twitter updates to students who choose to follow you, or regular updates to a blog, can keep students interested for a long time. You can link to presentations about your organizations and you can email specific information to individual students as appropriate.
• Tactic #5. Build virtual job fairs. Virtual job fairs have become common and are even more useful if you have already established a talent pool of interested students with your social network profiles and website. There are a host of virtual job fairs and more organizations are discovering them.
• Tactic #6: Use every source you have vigorously. Ask every new graduate you hire to tell others on campus about your profiles and website. Get them to recommend a few friends and then pursue them with good virtual advertising and a telephone campaign. If you hire interns, use them as both in-person and online ambassadors to other students. Have them act as talent scouts. Ask employees to recommend family friends. The goal has to be to pursue every avenue to find students who meet the skill needs your organization has. Cast a very wide net and let your website and social network profiles be your filter.

There are many more ways to leverage the Internet for campus recruiting. Over the next five years, virtual recruiting will be commonplace, and organizations that still plod around campus with presentations and cheese platters will be viewed as the dinosaurs – the companies no one wants to work for.

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.

The most common reason that college recruiting programs fail to attract the very best is focusing the recruiting effort on activities that have no chance of influencing or even reaching the very best. Usually these efforts work through the bureaucracy of campus career centers — an out-of-date resource that all but the most desperate of students learned to avoid decades ago. The informal name given to corporate recruiters who spend all of their time and resources at the career center by faculty is “seagulls,” because like the bird, these recruiters “fly in once or twice a year, drop a load of BS about caring, and then fly away.” Career centers are not academic program providers, so working solely with them can isolate you from the faculty and the academic programs. This isolated approach is okay if you’re targeting below-average students, but it won’t work if you want the top students from the high-demand academic programs.

Building a Competitive Advantage Requires a “Different” Approach

The very best recruiting programs, be they targeted at students or experienced hires, provide their firm with a distinct competitive advantage. Building that competitive advantage is difficult because almost all universities take an equal treatment approach to college recruiters, believing that every company and every student should have an equal opportunity. On the other hand, directors of college recruiting programs need to develop plans and approaches that provide them with better information and superior access compared to other firms.

One of the best ways to get an “inside track” on who’s who is to build long-term relationships directly with faculty. Close relationships with faculty are critical, because they, rather than departmental management or career center personnel, are the ones who really know and have relationships with the best students. Having taught at a university for more than 30 years, I can give you some insight into what it takes to get the attention of and to build lasting relationships with university faculty. I urge you to avoid the temptation of becoming just another “seagull” and instead, integrate yourself so that you eventually become part of the academic team.

The Advantages of Close Faculty Relationships

It takes sophisticated plans and a significant period of time to build close relationships with faculty, but the benefits that can accrue from these relationships are many and often include:

• Insights on top students. Because faculty teach, advise, and interact with students on an almost daily basis, they are more aware than most anyone about the skill levels and capabilities of potential recruits. They are likely to know whether a student has the competencies that you are seeking and especially whether they are innovators and team players.
• Ability to convince skeptical students. Because faculty members also serve as advisers, students often ask them for advice concerning which companies they should interview at and what job offers they should take. Establishing a relationship with faculty provides you with the ability to more accurately inform them about realities and influence what they may say.
• Recruit interns early. The career center works primarily with graduating seniors; however, faculty work with sophomores and juniors, so they can be beneficial in identifying and “selling” exceptional students early on as potential interns at your firm.
• Push employment branding messages through trusted channels. When faculty know about your firm and its best practices, they are more likely to use it as an example during class lectures, something that can have a profound impact on employment branding program success. Having credible faculty cite your firm during lectures and in assigned articles helps build your name awareness and positive employment brand image in a way that students have said affects them.
• Access to diversity. Diverse faculty (often with international backgrounds) have long been a support system for diverse students. Because they cultivate many relationships with such students, they are an excellent resource for providing advice on the best way to identify, recruit, and manage diverse and international students.
• Influencing the curriculum. When dealing with companies that recruit a great number of students, it is not uncommon to hear someone groan that college students today know nothing. While that isn’t entirely true, given the pace of change, it is entirely possible that students graduate with knowledge and skills that are slightly dated. Strong relationships with faculty provide corporations with an opportunity to influence curriculum and course topics. While you cannot force faculty to change what they teach, you can use the relationship to help them better understand where industry is now and where it is going to be. Most faculty want their students to do well in the business world, so they often consciously try to focus their teaching on the skills, competencies, and problems that graduates will likely face in industry.
• Garner research ideas. Building relationships with key research faculty can help to advance your firm’s own research and development work. Firms can learn from their existing research or build relationships with them, so that they target their research on your areas of need.
• Hiring faculty. Building relationships with faculty increases the likelihood that they might, at some point in their career, consider working for you. Employment possibilities might include working on a full-time basis, during a sabbatical, or during summer breaks.

Focusing on Academic Schools and Departments

When you decide to build relationships beyond the career center, some recruiting organizations make the mistake of targeting high-level university administrators. While it’s important to recognize that there are a few high-level administrators who really get to know students and their abilities, most are strong believers in “equal treatment” and will not offer additional help in recruiting no matter how much you may donate.

As a result, the best relationship building efforts should begin much lower in the individual colleges and academic programs. If you want a great electrical engineer, you need to focus on the College of Engineering and more specifically the Department of Electrical Engineering. There are some important exceptions, however, where you might have to look at several academic disciplines. If you’re looking for web designers or even programmers, you might find them in the engineering department but you could also find them in Arts, Broadcasting, or Communications programs. HR recruits will most likely be found in the HR program in the business school, but they might also be found in the psychology program.

Understanding Which Type Of Faculty To Target

Before you begin any program designed to build relationships with faculty it’s important that you understand the different groupings or classifications of faculty. This is because not all faculty members have the same interest and capability of helping you in your recruiting efforts. It’s a painful experience to spend significant time building a relationship with a faculty member, only later to find out that they have little first-hand knowledge of the type of students who you’re looking for. The first step in selecting faculty and others to target for relationship building is understanding the different groupings of faculty and what each group can provide. Some of the faculty groups and subgroups that you need to be aware of include:

Research vs. teaching faculty. Research faculty tend to be better known, and they are generally more senior in rank. They are often the “principal investigators” on research grants, which are usually listed on the university’s website. If you’re looking to recruit research staff for your firm, obviously you should start here, but be aware that their student contact is often limited to a few graduate and Ph.D. students. On the other hand, faculty who focus on teaching can teach as many as 10 times more students each semester. Teaching faculty also spend more time advising students, so they also have more opportunities to influence student decision-making when it comes to choosing a career. So if you’re looking for undergrads or master’s students, you should focus a significant period of time building relationships with teaching faculty. Identifying “teaching faculty” is relatively easy because they obviously teach more classes. Scanning the semester’s course offerings in the online “course schedule” and talking to teaching assistants (who can help you identify teaching faculty) are the two best ways to identify teaching faculty. Teaching faculty can also be separated into two groups. The first teaches primarily using lectures and textbooks, while the second group provides more projects, cases, and team problem-solving. This latter group of faculty are likely to be more aware of which students are leaders, good problem-solvers, and team players.

Tenured vs. tenure-track faculty. Professors who are early in their career are usually designated as “tenure-track” assistant professors. They are working toward tenure and as a result they have less time to focus on advising and teaching. Their laser focus on “getting tenure” also means that they are less likely to have any interest in talking to recruiters. Tenured faculty who are generally at the associate and full professor rank have been with the university at least five years and have lifetime job security. As a result, there is less pressure on them to focus exclusively on their research. Because tenured professors have more control over their time, they are generally the best to target for help in recruiting. You can identify an individual faculty member’s tenure status and rank in the faculty listing found in the university’s online bulletin, catalog, or website.

Part-time vs. full-time faculty. Between 40% and 60% of all faculty are full-time tenured or tenure-track. The remaining individuals who teach are known as lecturers or adjuncts, who generally teach part-time. Because lecturers cannot get tenure, they are often ignored by recruiters. Failing to build relationships with lecturers would be a major mistake, because at some universities, nearly half of the teaching is done by lecturers. Because of their high teaching load, their student contact is often among the highest of any faculty group. Because they work part-time, lecturers generally have full-time jobs in industry or have retired from industry. Lecturers do little research, so they have more time and interest in helping individual students. Also, as part-timers, they are often more willing to provide help closer to the outer “limits” of what universities will allow in the area of recruiting. You can find lecturers in the course schedule (they often teach at night) and sometimes they are also listed on the department’s website. Lecturers who are allowed to teach courses with relatively “high” course numbers are almost always among the best.

Honors vs. regular faculty. Some academic departments and programs have designated honors programs designed specifically for the very best undergraduate students. Often faculty who teach honors classes are specifically selected by the department chair because of their higher level of teaching rigor. Outsiders can’t always get a list of honors students before graduation, but faculty who teach honors classes automatically know them and their capabilities long before they graduate. If you’re looking for bright and driven students, it is critical that you identify and then build relationships with these key faculty.

Service-oriented faculty. Faculty are generally rewarded for excellence in three areas: research, teaching, and service. While most faculty focus primarily on research and/or teaching, up to 25% of full-time faculty really enjoy what are known as “service activities.” These service activities might include being a faculty advisor for a student organization or professional fraternity, running the internship or mentor program, coordinating “college-level” career or alumni programs, coordinating diversity/inclusion programs, or coordinating the tutor program. All of these service responsibilities involve significant student contact, so these individuals should become prime targets because of their broad exposure to the best students and their ability to influence them.

Deans. Many recruiting programs that are wise enough to target individual colleges within the university began their relationship building efforts with an attempt to get on the good side of the dean of the targeted college. Unfortunately, many college deans are too “detached” from day-to-day teaching to be able to offer very much help in the recruiting area. And because a significant part of their job is often fundraising, any help that they might provide will likely be provided with the expectation of a donation. In many cases, the most that you can expect to get from a dean are a few names and maybe an introduction to a few faculty members who might be around that day. As a result, I recommend that you spend little time with “the Dean” and instead focus on influencing the faculty and staff who work under them. You don’t want to get on their bad side, but you certainly shouldn’t expect them to be of much direct help when it comes to identifying and recruiting top students.

Department chairs. Department chairs are part administrators and part faculty. They shouldn’t be ignored even though their ability to provide direct recruiting help may be limited. In some cases, chairs teach few courses and do no major research and as a result, they can do little more than direct you to key faculty. However, in some cases, and especially in smaller departments, they are well aware of the names of the best students because they select them for scholarships, awards, honors, and for grad and student assistant positions.

“Non-Faculty” To Target

In addition to faculty members, other individuals who you should also consider targeting within the academic community include:

Grad and teaching assistants. At many larger universities, a significant portion of the undergraduate teaching load is handled by graduate students. They might be called research assistants, teaching assistants, or grad assistants. Some actually teach entire sections, while others merely assist professors who technically “own” the class. Although their time at the university might be limited to a few years, they should be prime relationship-building targets, because they see and work directly with students almost as much as some faculty members. Their relationships with students are particularly close because there is little age difference between them and their students. Not only do they know the best students grade-wise but quite often they know which students are the best team players and innovators. Incidentally, grad assistants, tutors, peer mentors, and professional club officers are often superstars themselves, so they should be prime recruiting targets. You can find the names of teaching assistants by looking in the course schedule. Other grad assistants can be identified by asking departmental secretaries or other grad assistants.

Administrative staff versus faculty. There are numerous program directors, managers, secretaries, and even student assistants who help academic colleges and departments operate. Most are extremely helpful, especially during academic breaks and during the summer. Some individuals like lab managers, IT managers, MBA coordinators, tutoring coordinators, and research directors are not only aware of the very best students, but in addition, they also have the capability of influencing them.

Coming Next Week in Part 2: Approaches and tips for building lasting relationships with individual faculty.

• 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).

The just released report offers up such datapoints as the top salary potential by variety of school, most popular jobs by degree or major, and top schools by pay potential according to geography.

Our favorite category? Top party school pay potential. And the winner in this category is University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This is a data rich report that has a statistical validity and a relatively high confidence interval for a survey of this kind. It’s a great resource for high school counselors and the results are sure to surprise more than a few corporate recruiters. Marketing and technical writing are among the more popular jobs for English majors and with median salaries in the mid-sixties, they won’t have to live in an attic room forever.

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.

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.

It is especially hard to get your offer accepted. Today’s students are more ch