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Campus recruiting and early career hiring offer organizations a competitive edge in the battle for highly skilled labor.
Companies in industries such as finance, consulting, technology, and biotech have traditionally had a presence on university campuses across the U.S. and have, historically, emerged as employers of choice for the most talented graduates.
College career fairs are the most widely known example of campus recruiting. Endless rows of stalls present touchpoints for students and staffing professionals to share details, ambitions, and opportunities in turn.
This corporate spin on speed dating is the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to valuable campus recruiting strategy, in an increasingly competitive setting.
What makes a competitive campus recruiting strategy?
Companies are approaching students even earlier in their education and with a combination of virtual and in-person communications. Indeed, the Society for Human Resource Management found that 84% of organizations consider campus recruiting as a strategic way to address their long term hiring needs.
Moreover, diversity in college enrolment has increased with each decade between 1980 and 2020, per the National Center for Education Statistics (2022).
Personalized, effective interactions with students and close, long-term partnerships with college institutions are now critical to winning the battle for early career talent. Let’s consider three fundamental basics of a competitive campus recruitment strategy.
1. Prioritize and nurture your campus relationships
Each campus is unique. Size, location, demographic make-up, variety of courses, strength of departments, and many other factors can help determine what colleges make the most sense for your organization. Just as students will pick and prioritize their colleges, so should you.
Larger corporations will be able to spread their resources across a wider range of colleges, but regardless of size and budget, prioritizing colleges allows campus recruiters to nurture closer relationships with their colleges of choice.
Seeking relationships, rather than short-term transactions, can help forge long-term partnerships with colleges to deliver a pipeline of talent well into the future, allowing organizations to meet capability requirements for years to come.
2. Attract attention with engaging material
College campuses are noisier than ever. Moreover, any marketer will tell you attention is the most valuable commodity, particularly amongst Gen Z with their infamous attention span of eight seconds.
This generation is of course capable of paying close attention, provided something cuts through the noise to offer clear value to them. Consider a combination of digital and in-person communication and have a clear message.
What students are you trying to attract? What is important to them in their studies, employment, and career? And what long-term support can you offer them as they complete their studies and move into the world of employment?
Building a close relationship with marketing within your organization can help deliver communications that best attract potential hires at the graduate level and more broadly across all talent acquisition.
3. Nurture your relationships with potential candidates
Cutting through the noise is a tough ask, particularly given the number of organizations now turning to campus recruiting as a source of competitive talent acquisition. But when campus recruiters do grab the attention of students, it’s important to keep it.
Building a close relationship with students can include inviting them to any number of touchpoints throughout their studies, from internship opportunities as freshmen, sophomores, or seniors, to personal coaching workshops.
Putting the right technology in place can also help keep students engaged. The student needs to have a portal to track their journey with your organization. Seeing their progress and experiences with you broken down on screen can help cement you as an employer of choice when they come to select their first career move.
“When evaluating college recruiting platforms, consider features like candidate relationship management, event scheduling, resume parsing, analytics and reporting, integration capabilities with your existing systems, and mobile accessibility for recruiters on the go,” says Tommy Lai, Global Head of Marketing, Oleeo. “This approach will help you scale to meet the needs of your organization.”
Each touchpoint is also an opportunity to assess candidates for readiness and begin developing the skills that they might need to thrive in their role, team, and organization.
Why bother with campus recruiting?
For starters, there’s a global $8.5 trillion talent shortage, according to a 2023 Korn Ferry report.
Campus recruitment offers employers the opportunity not just to directly target and engage highly skilled talent, but also to shape their skill development before they enter the workforce.
The finance industry, for example, has traditionally been at the forefront of campus recruiting alongside big tech. As many tech companies struggled with layoffs and hiring freezes in 2023, and rescinded countless job offers to graduates, it’s unsurprising that a 2023 report from the CFA institute found finance to be the most desirable, stable sector to work in among 18-25-year-olds.
It can also help recruitment teams to focus their time and attention, argues Lai:
“On average, recruiters are spending almost 2 hours each day on administrative tasks. This can include updating multiple spreadsheets or calendars and emailing multiple stakeholders about updates.
“Utilizing a flexible campus platform enables these campaigns and processes to be built and self-configured quickly. You can be specific and define process flows by programs and regions. You can build a branch of process flows, test and analyze, before rolling out on a global level. This means you can try new concepts without disrupting other processes.”
But the benefits don’t just stop at recruitment. Campus recruits often have higher retention rates. A study by the Institute of Student Employers found that the average retention rate for campus hires after three years sat at 85.5%.
Investing in a strategic, long-term approach to campus recruitment can help organizations to rise to the top the battle for skilled talent – and to stay there.
