Large employers looking at hybrid approach to campus recruiting this fall

What we’re hearing from most of our Fortune 1,000 company, government agency, and other employers who hire at scale customers is that they’re taking a wait-and-see approach to on-campus recruiting but expect that they’ll recruit on-campus at schools within an easy driving distance from the homes of their recruiters and hiring managers and remotely via Zoom etc. for schools that would require air travel, hotel stays, etc. 

I suspect that the issue driving the hybrid approach is simply the uncertainty around whether employees will be willing to commit to flying all over the country, eating inside restaurants, staying in hotels, etc. as early as September. Most might be fine with doing so when it gets to be September, but employers will need to put those plans into place within the next few months and it seems they’re skeptical that they’re going to be able to do so. 

Another issue is that they’ve seen first-hand that there isn’t a compelling reason to incur the tremendous cost associated with on-campus recruiting, whether that’s the staff time or travel costs, as they’ve been able to use college-specific job boards and other sourcing tools to reach the same students they did on-campus as well as far more, which has allowed them to better diversify their applicant pool not just in terms of race and gender but also geographically, schools, degrees, and more.

In short, many (most?) employers who spent the most money flying people around the country have discovered that they can get higher-quality hires far more quickly and far less expensively by using online resources first and maybe supplementing that with some local, on-campus efforts.