New Strategies to ace your Campus Recruitment

According to a 2018 study by Indeed, 61% of companies were looking to hire more employees but 42% of them were concerned about finding the right employee. Despite being aware of campus recruitment strategies, companies still find it hard to acquire top university talent. The main reason is that some companies are not able to adapt and incorporate new strategies quickly. But, given how fierce the competition is among companies to scout talent and changing expectations of future employees, it is time companies embrace change.

1. Build Impactful relationships with the students

Students aren’t shopping for jobs based on the pay scale or brand value anymore. They care about your company’s values, mutual benefits, and scope of growth which is why it is important to build meaningful relationships with students at each stage in the hiring process.

Before

i. Social Media Engagement: Create content that is consistent with your company’s values and candidate personas that appeal to Gen Zs and millennials.

• Automate your posts to maintain the frequency of posts
• Tag your posts with relevant hashtags to attract the right candidate
• Track metrics and use that to refine future posts
• Encourage existing employees to share posts to reach a wider audience

ii. Career Page: An attractive career page that speaks to future employees is powerful. It can give you an edge over your competitor and the chance for you to evaluate the quality of applicants allowing you to adjust your strategies if required.

• Emulate some of the best-designed career pages
• Review your competitor’s career page
• Track the traffic
• Re-target users to reinforce brand awareness

iii. Campus Ambassador: Word of mouth marketing is still relevant and students are more likely to believe a fellow student over a large corporation telling them they’re a good company to work with

• Incentivize the program to reach more students
• Collaborate with colleges to bring the right students on board
• Run activities via the campus ambassador
• Collect feedback to tailor the program

During

i. Pre-placement talk: Host an interactive session with students to give them a glimpse of what it would be like to work with you. Put away boring slides of the company’s profit margins and focus on what a future employee will get out of working at your company

• Show students a video of what a day at the company looks like
• Include testimonials from current employees
• Have a current employee share their experience
• Offer freebies in exchange for asking questions in the Q&A session

ii. Advertise your presence: Some companies place posters or distribute flyers to let students know of an impending drive

• To bridge the gap between offline and online, companies can include an NFC sticker or a QR Code on print material that allows students to tap or scan to learn more about the company, add the dates of the drive to their calendar or send an email to the hiring team to indicate their interest.
• If the college has an app, companies can also partner up with the authorities to make it beacon-aware. With a beacon-aware app, students that enter the range of a Bluetooth beacon receive a relevant location-based notification.

After

i. Keep candidates engaged: An accepted offer does not guarantee that the candidate will join your company. Several companies try to woo students which means that there is a high chance that they might drop off unless you keep them engaged. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Email them semi-regularly
• Get on a call to understand their expectations
• Introduce them to their managers
• Send them company newsletters

2. Harness the Power of Talent communities

One of the toughest hiring challenges for recruiters is to find talent in a limited job pool, especially for tech jobs. This is why companies need to leverage talent communities.

A talent community is essentially a medium that enables companies to connect with candidates that may not see a current opportunity that aligns with their skills and interest but leaves the door open for any future opportunities.

Simply put, it’s a hub where candidates can submit their information without committing to a specific role.

Talent communities are beneficial for the following reasons:

• They help you find candidates who are truly interested in working with your company
• You will never run out of candidates to interview
• Helps you capture and hire qualified candidates that you would otherwise lose if there are no current relevant openings
• Reduces the drop off rate because it merely requires students to submit their resume

Even if you can’t build a talent community, you can rely on third-party talent communities that have comprehensive candidate profiles that have completed intensive testing. This saves you time that it would otherwise take to conduct written tests or coding rounds and evaluate the results.

3. Use technology to your advantage

Hiring a new employee can cost upwards of $4000 which includes the cost of recruitment and screening. Technology can not only help you cut costs but also the amount of time it takes to hire an employee.

Only 26% of recruiters use an Applicant Tracking System or ATS to track applicants. Apart from using ATS, companies can also rely on chatbots to screen applicants as L’Oreal does.

Some of the other ways to leverage technology include:

• Conducting interviews over Skype instead of having an in-person interview
• Opening up avenues for potential candidates to apply - Career page, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn
• Incorporate social recruiting by posting openings on Facebook
• Analyze successful employee trends to create candidate personas
• Create employer branding videos to include in digital assets

4. Establish lasting relationships with the placement cell

Although this doesn’t come under a new strategy but is often overlooked. Being able to cherry-pick students before their competitors have a chance is just one of the many benefits of establishing a lasting relationship with the college’s placement cell.

Once a college makes it to your list, email them ahead of time and set up a call to discuss your requirements and start off promotional and awareness activities in advance. Make them privy to the non-confidential parts of your hiring process to give them a fair idea and enough time to prepare students accordingly.

You can also sponsor events at the college to strengthen the relationship and increase brand awareness at the same time

5. Keep metrics at the core

Data cannot and should not be ignored. At each stage in the recruitment process, collecting and analyzing data is crucial.

It is also important to collect the right data sets. For instance, if a post on social media is viral, that by itself is not a good indicator of a robust strategy. If the post has conversions i.e. students have clicked on the link to visit your website or career page, then you count that as a success.

Apart from gathering and analyzing data, it is also important to incorporate the feedback to make the process better and faster.

6. Competitive Hiring

Having a similar written test as other companies or one that has not been changed in years can cause the process to have a giant loophole. Students share information and there are training programs designed to teach them how to answer a certain pattern of questions.

The written tests can also leave the students jaded and unwilling to try something new which is bad news for companies in the digital age where everyone is expected to grow and adapt at exponential rates.

This is why several companies have made the shift to competitive hiring. Essentially, companies rely on events, competitions or Hackathons to identify talent instead of relying on age-old written tests.

Not only does this allow companies to explore a different side of the candidate and increase employer awareness but it also acts as a robust filter and sieves out candidates that are not a great fit for the company.

7. Know candidates on a personal level with One on one interaction:

Once candidates are assessed in the initial rounds of campus drive, it is time for taking it to the next level.tCandidates often feel ignored during the campus recruitment drives because of the fact that many candidates get shortlisted in the initial rounds. After shortlisting the final set of candidates from a particular campus, it is important to connect with the shortlisted candidates on a personal level to achieve more conversion and offer acceptance.

That is where the Code Sync video interviewing feature of Talscale makes an impact. You no longer require Skype or Hangouts to connect with candidates. Code sync not only helps you talk to candidates individually but also introduce your tech team with the candidates for a better understanding of how your team works and the exciting projects they are working on to generate interest of the candidate and give him a feel of the tech culture at your company.

What are you waiting for? Try Talscale for your Campus recruitment needs today! Get your free trial here or get in touch with us for a live product demo.

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