How to Create a Successful College Recruiting Program - Introduction (Part 1 of 14)
A Recipe for Successful College Recruiting
Today, people look for simple recipes for success in all areas of life and work. And most major processes like college recruiting can be dissected into identifiable components. If you experimented a little, you might dream up a recipe for college recruiting as follows:
- Take one part pre-screened college students with skills and personality characteristics that fit into your company’s culture.
- Add one part savvy recruiter who knows exactly what motivates today’s college students.
- Add one part expert recruiter with the ability to spot talent the way baseball scouts look for the next generation of home run champs.
- Mix well during interviews and presentations on-campus and on-site.
The result -- a steady stream of talent to run your company in the future, supplement areas where state-of-the-art skills are required, and provide temporary, ready-to-work, fill-in employees.
Clearly, this explanation oversimplifies the college recruiting process. But very few corporate leaders would argue with the results. Targeting college students creates a concentrated pool of talent for recruiting.
Because college students represent a readily available and unique talent pool several times a year, your college recruiting program must address the timing of recruiting as well as the specialized needs of college students. These two factors present a challenge for human resources professionals and differentiate recruiting college students from recruiting experienced professionals from the general work force.
The Purpose of This Series of Blog Entries
Given this unique but rewarding challenge, the purpose of this series of CollegeRecruiter.com Blog entries is to define and describe the basic steps to create a successful college recruiting program.
These steps may seem obvious activities requiring project management mixed with common sense and significant recruiting experience. And they are. But it’s also clear from interviews with experienced human resources managers who control college recruiting programs that it’s the details that count. The common, everyday, persistent application of simple process steps makes a college recruiting program successful.
The Definition of Success
What might be running through your mind is this question – what makes a college recruiting program successful? The definition is corporate-specific and tied to individual recruiting program objectives.
For example, when recruiting college students for leadership roles, experienced human resources managers mention the following key indicators for program success:
- Are hiring targets being met? For example, we planned to hire 100 college students from 25 colleges for our leadership program. Did we meet that target?
- How are the individuals faring in the organization? Are they getting outstanding performance evaluations? Are they getting the expected promotions?
- What are the costs per hire? How does that compare to the cost per hire for experienced hires?
College Recruiting Program Steps
Achieving a successful college recruiting program, whatever the individual company definition of success, requires a clear-well defined plan composed of the following steps. This publication will define and flesh out these steps for ease of execution.
- Identify external and internal factors affecting your program.
- Assess your past performance.
- Describe your target audience.
- Target schools.
- Define the methods you will use to reach your target market.
- Gain internal commitment for the college recruiting program.
- Define the methods you will use to reach your target market.
- Plan/schedule on-campus visits.
- Plan/schedule on-site visits.
- Execute your program.
- Track your program.
In addition to these steps, this series will include sections entitled Designing a Web Site to Address Student Concerns and the Importance of Internships. The first of those two sections will employment site structure and usability as well as how to address specific student concerns. The second of the two sections will present reasons why it’s necessary for companies to offer internships.
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