Creating Employment Buzz On Campus: Standing Out In A Crowd
I had the pleasure of being a guest on a Human Capital Institute webcast earlier this week with Kristine Rhodes, Executive Director Talent Strategy for NAS Recruitment Communications, and Kristy Seidel, Manager of Recruiting for Hyatt Hotels and Resorts. The discussion was why and how employers should stand out from the crowd if they want to be successful in their efforts to hire college students for internships and recent graduates for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.
On today's college campuses, "eye-ball" time is at an all-time premium. Students are bombarded daily with credit card offers and philanthropic requests while employers are trying to communicate with them to fill their ranks with top-tier talent. The market is so saturated that investing dollars and effort may not guarantee success, but innovative strategizing will. Great employers struggle to stand out from the crowd and often don't have enough of their targeted students' bandwidth to communicate their differences.
To understand how to communicate with young talent one must start by asking questions and listening to the answers. In this case-study webcast, hundreds of attendees heard how Hyatt, already a premier hospitality employer, designed and implemented their college recruitment strategy. We also heard about how NAS and CollegeRecruiter.com created and implemented a national e-survey of thousands of students and recent grads to identify their employment messaging preferences. The results were fascinating and often completely unexpected.
We learned that there are more than 19 million college students at 4,140 college campuses. We discussed who the students identify as being their employers of choice and why. We talked about the paradigm shift in attitudes between students of yesterday and today and then looked at the results of the survey.
CollegeRecruiter.com emailed a small portion of the 10 million students and recent graduates in our double opt-in targeted email database. We incentivized respondents by giving away two $300 gift certificates on Northwest Airlines. The targeting and incentive combined to get us 443 responses from U.S. students and recent graduates with 210 of those being seniors, 163 underclassmen, and 70 recent graduates.
We asked a lot of questions but some of the more interesting pieces of information to come out were:
- 61 percent indicated they began to seriously job search in their senior year and 23 percent in their junior year.
- 57 percent want to communicate with recruiters monthly, not just at fall recruiting and then again when they report for duty in the spring.
- About 70 percent preferred to receive company information by email, 40 percent by phone, 25 percent by traditional advertising such as newspapers, 25 percent by RSS feeds / job alerts, 15 percent information sessions, 15 percent career fairs, 5 percent cell phone text messaging (SMS), and 5 percent podcasts.
- 90 percent felt strongly that employers should sponsor or participate in networking events on campus and talk about their job opportunities at those events. So sponsor sporting events, dinners, community service events, and more.
- Although social networking sites get a lot of buzz, few are using them for job hunting. Only 17 percent use LinkedIn, 15 percent Facebook, and 9 percent MySpace for job hunting. Yet almost 70 percent of those who expressed an opinion feel that it is appropriate or even cool for employers to advertise their job opportunities on social networking sites. So students may not be using the sites that much yet but it is seems that it is because employers have not yet embraced them.
The webcast was recorded so those who were not able to attend can watch the slides and listen to the audio at their convenience by going to the Human Capital Institute website.
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