The campus recruiting landscape continues to shift. Between Generation Z’s arrival in the workforce, the rise in job hopping among younger generations, students’ demand for digital experiences and always-changing communication preferences, it’s tough to stay ahead in campus recruiting.
At STRIVE 2019, Yello’s 10th annual talent acquisition conference, campus recruiting leaders offered their perspective on university recruitment and the keys to attract and recruit top student talent. Read on for a few university recruitment takeaways from STRIVE 2019.
Speaker quotes have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jylian Feliciano
Head of Inclusive and Campus Recruitment Programs, ConAgra Brands
ConAgra’s campus program has gone through a digital transformation. We’re finding that campus teams are now becoming more lean and we need our recruiters to focus on what matters.
Getting to talent is heavily correlated with our ability to connect and build relationships, so we don’t have time to play with manual sheets.
So let’s let the process work all of the tactical pieces, and let’s put our recruiters up front and arm them with the right speaking points and tools. They’re now able to mentor candidates into our organization.
Mark Valadez
Talent Projects and Programs Leader, CommScope
We started a program to encourage students to become advocates for us and we’ve done that in a couple of different ways. First, we invested in the creation of a university relations page and use that as a marketing vehicle for interns to provide testimonials and write blogs on our behalf. We also use social media, a space they’re familiar with, to host Facebook Live events with our interns.
Students want to see people like them when they’re making a job choice. They want to know that a company represents what they’re interested in.
And when students see their peers sharing on Facebook Live or blogging for a company, it really does a lot for our brand. In fact, students have started to come to us, instead of us engaging them.
Jared Bazzell
Talent Acquisition Manager, CDW
Here at CDW, we’ve worked on tying things like source and school to ROI. Are hires from certain channels more productive, faster?
If we know the median entry-level sales hire at CDW isn’t profitable until X, but when we can hire them from Y source, they’re profitable two times quicker, that’s a game changer. Those are the types of sound bites that our executives want to hear.
Lauren Santimauro
Campus Recruiting Manager, A.T. Kearney
How are we moving to a completely virtual campus recruiting model? We are a consulting firm; people are our products, and so we have to showcase our culture. We’ve done that through a series of both webinars and newsletters.
We curate the content based on what our candidates share with us; if they share that they’re interested in a specific diversity network or a specific practice, we then send targeted newsletters and information.
Stacey Wetterer
Director of Management Programs, Cintas
My goal is always to be able to show our senior leaders the value of our team, from what our team does, to the target schools that we choose, to how we go about selecting those schools, how we select candidates from these schools, the return on the events and the number of events we go to.
Early on in our strategy, we focused on the quantity of events—we were trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Now, we’ve shifted to focus on quality of events, not quantity.
