Take your campus recruiting to the next level.
The variety of moving parts throughout your organization’s campus recruiting strategy can be one of the most difficult to manage. From engagement to interviews to offers to onboarding, campus recruiting presents an assortment of challenges for any team.
Selecting the right system to help manage these continuously moving parts is crucial to the success of your recruitment team. This guide runs through the most common challenges recruiters face on campus, and the solutions needed to solve these challenges.
CAMPUS RECRUITMENT’S BIGGEST CHALLENGES
- Keeping candidates engaged
- Identifying key universities/colleges
- Competing with larger, more established companies on campus
- Managing event schedules
- Sorting through hundreds of resumes after each event to find the right hires
- High administrative costs managing multiple platforms for communication
- Improving diversity recruits
- Tracking event metrics
- Organizing and scheduling multiple interviews
84% of employers understand that college hiring is important. Yet almost all agree that it’s really hard to attract good college talent. How can you make it easier for your recruitment team to find the right talent faster?
START WITH AN AUDIT
THE PROBLEMS LISTED ON THE PREVIOUS PAGE CAN BE REMEDIED WITH THE RIGHT CAMPUS RECRUITMENT SOLUTION. TO FIND THE RIGHT SOLUTION, IT’S IMPORTANT TO FIRST AUDIT YOUR CURRENT CAMPUS RECRUITING STRATEGY.
DO YOU HAVE THESE TACTICS IN PLACE?
- Key Universities/Colleges are identified
- Ideal candidate characteristics are identified
- Competencies for campus new hires are identified
- Co-op and internship programs are in place
- Campus recruiting relations timeline is developed and implemented
- Philanthropy programs and research is aligned with targeted recruiting schools which include diversity & inclusion
TIP: If you find yourself saying no to a significant amount of these tactics, break down each by priority levels and initiate in stages as to not overwhelm your recruitment department
KEY FEATURES
Investing in a solution to help plan campus recruitment efforts is the first step to solving the issues listed above. Some systems may focus more on event organization, and others may focus on managing multiple interviews, offers and resumes. The most important thing to remember when evaluating each is to ensure the solution meets the needs most important to your recruitment team, ideally in one unified system.
Tools to Alleviate Administrative Burden
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. Take away this burden and streamline tasks by using a system that unifies communication throughout the whole department and with candidates. Recruiters will then be able to complete these tasks with one update instead twelve.
Ability to Streamline the Screening Process
Did you know recruiters can receive about 250 applications per job opening? In the four to five hours at a career fair, they can also meet with dozens of candidates and receive contact information for all of them. The hard part is then taking those applications from the events and finding the right talent before the competition scoops them up. Finding a solution to address this issue can be the difference between getting a “yes” after extending an offer to a candidate, or getting a “no” because the competition got to them first.
According to research Oleeo conducted with Universum, “competition is tougher than you might imagine – Across almost one million campus applications reviewed, an average of 50-90,000 students apply for programs. Of those applying, only approximately 2% make the offers stage, whereas an average of 70% of candidates find themselves screened out from the start. A further 17% end up dropping out, declining or reneging because the process is taking too long to get to offer stage.”
DO THIS:
What is taking up the most time in your recruiters’ days? Emailing? Scheduling? Updating calendar after calendar or spreadsheet after spreadsheet? Get with your team to answer what tasks are taking up the most time and look for a solution with intelligent automation and tools to streamline administrative tasks and unify communication.
Event Management
Attending career fairs isn’t the only way to connect with new grads and bring in the best talent to your open entry-level position. You can also organize classroom sessions and lunches, or attend hackathons and contests. Although, with all these different events, keeping a calendar and promoting your organization’s presence can be a lot to keep up with.
DO THIS:
While there are applicant tracking systems that can help solve this problem, it’s beneficial to look for an intelligent ATS that uses algorithms, predictive scoring & smart filtering tools to help zero in on candidates and accelerate the screening process.
Ease of Implementation
What is the one thing that can ultimately prevent an investment from proving itself useful? Implementation. If the selected solution meets resistance amongst team members because it is not user-friendly, chances are your investment may be stopped in its tracks. Not everyone on the team may be on the same level when it comes to tech savviness, and that’s okay, but choosing the right solution means it works for everyone.
DO THIS:
Invite team members from the department to test drive the solution and ensure it helps remedy their most difficult pain points when it comes to event management. It may also be beneficial to look for a solution that has the capability to publish straight to your company’s social profiles to get the word out about events you’ll be attending.
Mobile and Cloud Capabilities
From setting up at career fairs to talking at information sessions then all the way back to the office, your team needs to be able to access information at anytime (from practically anywhere) to get their job done and stay up-to date with communication. Looking for a solution to give your recruiters this capability will set you apart from the competition in terms of technology used within the department as well as what the candidates see. If they have the ability to set up an interview by self scheduling on their phone while walking from class to class, it may boost their impression of your organization as a whole.
DO THIS:
Testing the solution is a given when searching for a campus recruitment system. Bring in different individuals on the team with a range of tech skills to assess whether or not it would be easily implemented within the department. Make sure to look for a vendor who provides support from day one to ensure implementation will be a breeze.
Service and Support
Technical support is crucial because not everything will always go right and when you need help, knowing there’s an expert on the other end of the phone can be comforting after a hiccup. A solution that provides support for all users, including candidates, can be the most ideal when your recruiters may not be available to help them through the process.
DO THIS:
Research ratings and reviews of systems you’re interested in exploring to get a sense of how other users feel about their customer support level.
Other Features to Consider:
- Real-time reporting
- Interview scheduling
- Referral management
- Onboarding management
- Diversity recruitment tactics
- Internship program management
- Apprenticeship program management
- Super Day interview and outcome management
Discover Oleeo Recruiting Enablement for Campus & Early Careers
Oleeo Recruiting Enablement for Campus & Early Careers combines the power of six of our products to create a complete end-to-end system covering your entire college, MBA, PhD and apprenticeship recruitment process. Never miss a step with the ability to track, engage and capture candidates from early stages like at career fairs, through applications, superday interviews, right through to offer, internship and ultimately a full-time offer. Experience support like never before with a dedicated account manager to ensure you are getting the highest professional standards of software development, implementation and support. Explore our campus recruiting software.
LOOKING FOR PROOF?
Oleeo Recruiting Enablement for Campus & Early Careers helped make campus recruiting a globally connected, data-driven function for Morgan Stanley. The results:
- Improved decline rates – Oleeo helped lower their declined offer rate by 10%
- First investment bank to launch strengths-based interviewing – piloted across most divisions at various stages of the process
- Increased year round campus presence – more events outside the busy autumn season with some regions also pushing up their recruiting timeline
- Continued focus on pre-university strategy – school outreach events and programs that pipeline into spring and summer analyst initiatives
- Enhanced campus operations risk measures and controls – Anti Corruption Group standards, regulatory, conduct risk assessments and controls, workflows and process maps enhanced and documented
- Cost savings in campus recruiting by streamlining processes, teams and programs of $1.1m
“Oleeo really helps us focus on getting meaningful results in campus recruitment. Year-on-year we are seeing real differences with a significantly improved candidate experience at the application stage.”
– Stephanie Ahrens, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley
LOOKING FOR MORE PROOF?
Our expertise helped NBCUniversal breakdown diversity barriers and build a strong pipeline of diverse talent in the following ways:
- Creating customized registration processes so that students can register directly
- Host ‘Behind the Scenes” webinars to ensure students are prepared for the recruiting journey ahead
- Hosting organized site visits
- Hosting/Sponsoring the organization’s DAP (Dynamic Assessment Process) for over 100 prospective scholars annually
- Running volunteer Opportunities such as Resume & Writing Coaches for high school students
“Through our multi-pronged recruitment approach, we’ve seen an increase in the number of diverse hires that have come through our program. Our multipronged and intentional diversity efforts, with help from Oleeo, have diversified the candidate pool and have educated students on the opportunities that exist and their attainability to students who may not have been reached by NBCUniversal in years past.”
– Erica Arden, Manager, Diversity
Transform Your Campus Recruiting Today
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