Can you truly combine these two tactics for even better results than before? Yello believes so, and over the past year we’ve been tracking what has worked and what needs to be rethought. The good news is that a well-crafted hybrid strategy will make your recruiting tasks easier: engaging more candidates in the ways they prefer and saving you considerable time and effort. Simply follow these 5 best practices:

1.  Set highly specific campus recruitment hiring goals.

This is the year when you need to go further than your usual overall hiring goals, setting quantified needs for specific categories. With exact targets to aim for, you can create more precise plans for sourcing and engagement. For example:

Your overall campus recruiting goal is:
200

Within this, specific candidate needs are:
• 100 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• 50 STEM
• 25 Military
• 25 Business, legal & marketing

2.  Define your “dream” hiring experience and process.

For your company to shine among the competition, you have to provide what candidates want to know at each step of the process. So map out your candidate journey and plan how you will highlight your brand and culture at every step. Each touchpoint is an opportunity to make a lasting impression.

In addition, consider how well you are using technology in your campus recruiting process. Today’s sophisticated systems can save you huge amounts of time by collecting information into one place, providing engagement tools that assure regular contact, and simplifying interview scheduling. You can create big wins for your recruiting team through automation.

3.  Take a fresh look at your sourcing and engagement strategy.

You have more choices than ever today in how you find candidates, interest them in your company, and seal the offer deal. So don’t blindly commit to what you’ve done before. Stop and ask yourself these questions:

What schools provide the best ROI? Assess your data and label which schools offer the most value and which should be reconsidered. The schools providing your biggest hiring successes should trump any “name” schools that no longer deliver.

What’s the right number of university partnerships? During COVID, some employers engaged fewer schools and still met hiring goals. And some engaged more schools by shifting entirely to virtual. This is an appropriate time to reassess what each school can do for you.

Do you customize your initial candidate engagement? Some candidates will be coming to you from physical events, others from virtual screens — two very different ways of meeting people. Each group is best served with its own initial engagement process, and taking this care will let you leapfrog over competitors who don’t.

How can you best take advantage of virtual recruiting? It shouldn’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Consider virtual coffee chats or one-on-one meetings to continue engagement after in-person events. Or create a virtual presence at your non-core schools through webinars and pre-recorded interviews. Remember, you now will have plenty of options.

Broad sourcing or targeted sourcing? More and more companies prefer to find specific types of candidates, rather than dealing with an overly-large candidate pool.

Who’s driving the technology? As there is no industry standard, today’s multiple recruiting technologies don’t always play nicely with each other. Your success depends on getting the most out of your own system — so have a plan for working with, not acquiescing to, the technologies each school provides.

How quickly can you make offers? Competition is at a high for top candidates, so it’s critical you can schedule and conduct interviews without rigamarole, and make offers without delay. Revise your operational workflow to be more efficient and effective.

4.  Revisit how you will capture information in this new era of physical and virtual campus recruiting.

Capturing candidate information and moving quickly to engagement is a foundational element of every recruitment program. However you use technology, the process and tools must support your strategy — which can be difficult if these tools are dictated by the university or are one-size-fits-all apps like Zoom. Consider these questions when choosing the technologies you employ:

  • How are you going to register candidates — in person, mobile or virtual?
  • Is it easy to bring candidates right into the system for follow-up, engagement and interviews?
  • Will you have to reconfigure or redesign your intake forms?
  • Are there time-saving video tool options connected into an end-to-end recruitment management system?
  • How will you handle events when a school dictates you use their platform?
  • How will you host your own physical and/or virtual events?

5.  Have a plan to prepare your internal team.

Engagement is not only important for candidates, but also for your own team in the face of operational change. The increased use of virtual tools may be outside some recruiters’ comfort zones, and they may need training and motivation on using this technology. Be certain to own the process, clearly communicate your new recruiting strategy, and listen to team feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

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