Back to School for Candidates
By: Tim Augustine
Develop a college recruitment program that builds your firm's brand and identifies future stars.
During my research for my book, How Hard Are You Knocking?, I interviewed multiple companies to better understand their strategies for recruiting recent college graduates. I discovered that 71% of the companies had dedicated programs focused on attracting, selecting and hiring new college graduates, and many of those companies had lots to share about developing college recruitment programs.
As you develop your college recruitment strategy, make sure you research the most appropriate colleges and universities, identify specific positions you need to fill and create a marketing message that will help your organization attract eager college students preparing for graduation.
Here are various strategies you should consider when developing your own college recruitment program.
Develop an internship program
An internship program is an effective way to bring talent into your organization and introduce your company to prospective graduates. Many colleges and universities require internships for their students in their fields of study. An internship program can help your firm build relationships with local colleges or universities as well as allow you to evaluate prospective candidates for full-time hire.
During my research, I found 52% of the firms pay their interns during their tenure. Paid internships typically attract the most interest from students, broadening the group from which you can recruit.
When the intern arrives, be sure your program offers a balance between work you need done and exposure to learning new skills related to your industry and firm. Internships that only provide opportunities to get your and other employees busy work done will not help you discover potential talent, and likely will be
Identify the best colleges and universities
As you develop a possible list of schools to recruit from, look at your existing staff. Develop a list of your best employees and leaders, and research the schools that they attended. You could leverage their alumni status to make the initial contact as well as increase your chances to find additional talent similar to the employees you listed. In addition, there are many published sources that you can use that rank top university programs in your specific field of study.
Building long-term relationships
As you develop your program and identify the schools, begin to research specific departments, organization and people within the school to focus your efforts on such as:
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Department Heads
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Student Organizations
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Career/Placement Offices
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Existing and Past Interns
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Alumni Associations
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Most Popular Instructors and Professors
Build your company's brand image with the colleges and universities you have identified to target via these people and groups. Ongoing branding efforts can be accomplished by sponsoring career fairs and student organization regional competitions, and setting up a recruitment booth in the building of the program you are targeting during an average school day. The more opportunity you have to build your brand the more receptive the students will be to entertaining offers from you.
Provide value to your partner schools
As you develop your program make sure you also focus on bringing value to the institution. For instance, at Atwell-Hicks, we have a number of programs that we use with our list of 31 schools. We partner with the civil engineering department and work with professors to offer a real-life case study of a difficult project. We present the project summary at the beginning of the semester, allow the students to work through the various client requirements throughout the semester and provide the actual solution. At the end of the semester, the students are given an opportunity to present their project summary to the actual project team at Atwell-Hicks who oversaw the project. The students are given an opportunity to justify the decisions they made while receiving feedback from the project manager. The program is wrapped up with an appreciation dinner that recognizes the participants as well as provides information about Atwell-Hicks.
The students get to work on a real project and we have a chance to present our firm and identify the best students in the class. As you partner with the universities work with the professors or department heads to identify mutually benefit offerings your firm could provide to their programs.
We also offer paid internships that allow the students to rotate through a number of different positions in the firm. We hold educational industry workshops to student organizations in our field. In addition, we have leveraged my book to provide job search seminars to student groups and classes focusing on building resumes, interviewing skills and career development strategies.
Whatever you do, make sure you are building long-term relationships with the schools. Your company's reputation is critical when visiting schools, organizations and classes. Use the opportunity to begin building relationships with potential candidates as well. Provide marketing giveaways such as golf shirts, backpacks and sweatshirts with your logo. You want to be the employer of choice on that campus.
Structure your presentations
Following is a list of things we do when we visit schools.
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We provide the students with pizza and sodas and as they enter the room for our group presentation; we show a marketing DVD on a continuous loop while they eat.
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Once the group is settled, we open with the DVD of the leaders sharing the philosophy and enthusiasm of our firm. Giving the students a big picture view of why we believe we are the best.
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Upon completion of the DVD, we present a PowerPoint presentation reviewing the specifics of our firm, what makes us different and what our criteria of the ideal candidate is.
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We close with questions from the group.
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Students are required to sign in and list their contact information, major and date of graduation so that we may contact them throughout the school year.
In addition, we typically provide them with dinner and recognize key contributors (the student chapter reps; any professors and department heads, if present; and recognize any of our past or present interns). We try to coordinate our on campus presentations and interviews either before or after our industry specific career fair to ensure additional company exposure.
Upon the completion of our presentation we conduct face-to-face "thank you" meetings with department heads, the placement office and student chapter reps, and give them small gifts of appreciation. The following day, we conduct face-to-face scheduled interviews with candidates for internships and full-time positions. We send thank you cards to all who attended and invite students to visit the offices during holiday breaks.
However you approach the development of your college recruitment program, be sure to create one with building relationships in mind. Your company always will need access to the best and brightest new employees. Building strong relationships on campus, and having a strategy for serving and leveraging them, will keep your company at the top of the list for graduating students.
