The current lull in college recruiting is an opportune time to evaluate new strategies and tools. It is no secret that the vast majority of organizations that recruit from college campuses globally do so tactically, employing little or no strategy. To even the casual observer, the approaches used are predictable, pedestrian, and in some cases laughable, but all of that is about to change.
From the vantage point of someone who has been involved in college recruiting for more than 40 years, either representing a corporation or a university, it is clear that we are approaching a strategic inflection point with regard to the amount of strategy supporting college recruiting.
As that inflection point approaches, there are several dramatic changes that you should anticipate, including:
All of the changes highlighted above point to a demand for the college recruiting function to migrate away from being a game of chance to a more serious function that embraces cutting-edge marketing and sales tactics to deliver specific students to the organization. The modern arsenal of tools needed will include CRM (customer relationship management) systems and highly segmented branding informed by robust market research.
Marketing Demands That You Fully “Understand” Your CustomerRecruiters, both those who focus on experienced and college recruiting, often assume that they know and understand the type of people the organization needs to recruit. In direct contrast, marketing professionals, even those with strong track records of success, rely on routinely executed market research to provide real-time understanding and identify the changing needs of target customers when taking new products or updated products to market.
Having been students before and having dealt with students/faculty day in and day out as part of the job, many college recruiters approach college recruiting from a state of familiarity that no may no longer have any basis in reality. University campuses today are awash with diversity. There are students from all generational segments, races, national origins, and experience levels. U.S. veterans returning from foreign assignments as troop retrenchment proceeds are flocking to colleges and universities flush with GI Bill benefits. In many public institutions, the stereotype of the typical student being an 18-22 year old is no longer representative of the majority.
To fully understand the complex landscape of students participating in college programs today and the relevance/attraction of your opportunities to them, full-blown market research is needed.
In order to successfully recruit not only the right number, but also the right caliber of students needed, you should fully understand your target both when designing new jobs and when taking those job opportunities to them. You’ll need to know how best to identify them, communicate with them, and what factors about your organization and the jobs you have available they would find both relevant and compelling.
Benchmark research can tell you what students in general are thinking, but they do not provide nearly enough information to build out a recruiting strategy that targets highly refined student segments. Using a homegrown process or services provided by Universum or LinkedIn’s Insights Group, execute surveys or focus groups to find out about:
Their job search process — if you have no clue how top students go about finding and vetting career opportunities, you have no chance of landing the best talent. Identify the specific steps they take and the timeline they use when searching for jobs.
Their job excitement criteria — identify the specific factors about your industry, organization, and jobs available that would excite your target students enough for them to both consider you relevant and an organization they would like to work for. Also identify the factors that are turnoffs.
How to “successfully” counter perceived negatives — no organization is perfect, no matter what picture your recruiting collateral paints, so at some point you will need to respond to those factors that are turnoffs identified earlier. Like a child standing in a puddle of juice exclaiming “I didn’t spill it,” not all counters are effective. Learn what sources students would trust countering messages from, what types of evidence may sway them, and what justifications they accept as valid for turnoffs with a strong basis in reality.
Identify where they “hang out” or “lurk” — with a good understanding of how your target audience searches for opportunities and evaluates them, the next step is to identify where you could place messages that would influence their perception of your organization and compel them to act on current opportunities available. You need to know what they read, watch, listen to, and attend. Fourteen questions to consider include:
You should also find out if top prospects frequent different “locations” than average students. Once you have identified the most-effective channels for reaching them with a recruiting or employer branding message, you can then shift your attention to the content of that message.
Identify the message required to get their attention — design and pre-test both branding and recruitment-related messages to make sure that if a target student sees them, even briefly, that the content would drive them to read the entire message and take the desired action, i.e. visit your website, attend a college information session, apply for a position, sign up for an interview or make a call to a recruiter, etc.
In the next installment of this two-part series, I’ll tackle applying your market research to direct sourcing initiatives to identify and tap top students on/off campuses around the globe.
