You need effective talent, but can’t pay huge bucks for it. What now?

Ted Bauer is a contributing author to College Recruiter

By Ted Bauer, contributing author to College Recruiter

As a smaller business, what you need is effective talent. That, coupled with strong decision-making and the right technological assets, will help you get competitive with your bigger in-industry rivals.

If you lack the talent, though, everything that comes next usually isn’t that successful. The problem, of course, is that traditional methods of getting talent — especially young talent, which (truth be told) can be gotten cheaper and developed — cost money. Doing on-campus college recruiting involves asset production, plane fares, hotel rooms, and other costs.

As a result, many companies — SMBs to enterprises like Goldman Sachs and Lockheed Martin — are shifting resources away from on-campus recruiting and into virtual/interactive recruiting.

No matter how you approach digital vs. in-person, your goal should be to maximize your ROI from your college recruiting efforts. To do that, you might need to move around some budget buckets: less on-campus and more interactive/digital/social/job board work.