How Employers Can Prepare to Recruit Early Talent This Spring
Spring recruiting season is a time when companies primarily focus on internship and co-op recruiting, while in the fall recruiters are hiring full-time employees. Yello helps organizations achieve a high volume of hiring, while assuring recruiters have the technology to better manage each step of early talent recruitment, from hello to hired.
We’ve tapped our recruiting experts and compiled the best tips on how to achieve your hiring goals this year. We’ll also help you navigate what’s new for 2023.
#1. Understand where you are now before you create goals for the spring season.
Yello helps recruiters track and report on key recruiting insights to uncover areas for improvement within every step of the candidate journey. Before booking any more campus or virtual events, it’s important for recruiters to set specific and measurable benchmarks and goals. Which schools and events had the best ROI? Where were there bottlenecks in your pipeline? How did your organization do on diversity?
Getting a clear picture of where your organization is now and where it wants to go helps you determine which efforts and tools make a positive impact on your new goals.
#2. Host a WayUp managed Virtual Event to help build a pipeline of candidates for the fall season.
Yello joined forces with WayUp in 2021, and now Yello customers can leverage the nation’s best candidate sourcing database with over 7 million candidates. It’s not just the size of WayUp’s database that makes it so powerful, but also the fact that the data is all self-reported by candidates, and therefore most accurate and compliant.
With WayUp managed events, our team does all the targeted sourcing for you in addition to running the event logistically for you on the day of. Then, post-event, our team will send you tons of diversity demographic data about how candidates engaged. All your team needs to do is show up with the content you want to present! Many of our customers use these to really drive engagement from a specific group of candidates they are looking to attract and promote their brand or opportunities to.
Yello & WayUp is the first all-in-one campus & diversity recruiting solution. Source diverse, qualified talent from our database of over 7 million candidates. Then engage, interview, and evaluate them without missing a beat.
#3. Post a pipeline resume drop to begin collecting candidates for the fall season.
Students looking for internships today will be looking for full time opportunities in the fall. It takes time to build your employer brand and attract the best candidates. Leverage Yello’s tools to nurture candidates, target candidates with specific criteria, schedule email sends in advance, and showcase your company culture with links to company videos, talent communities, resources, and more.
#4. Reduce renege rates by engaging summer intern candidates who’ve accepted offers.
The competition for the best early doesn’t stop when a candidate accepts an offer. Companies are continually broadcasting their message and attempting to lure early talent their way, that’s why it’s imperative to stay top of mind. Yello allows recruiters to personalize candidate engagement to help create a proactive talent community for your organization. Yello’s built-in CRM functionality allows you to slash your tech stack and boost pipeline efficiency.
Here are some best practices we share with our clients:
Step 1: Send out a survey asking about how/when candidates want to be contacted between offer acceptance and internship start.
Step 2: Set expectations with candidates as to when they can expect to hear crucial details from you and your team.
Step 3: Execute communication regularly (monthly, or based on what candidates indicate they prefer) until candidates start in their intern role.
Additional ideas
- Give opportunities for interns to connect with each other prior to the start date.
- Connect them with a contact internally (maybe within the business unit – a mentor) who they can ask questions about the work they might be involved in.
#5. Contact candidates that already exist in your pipeline before performing outside searches.
Yello allows recruiters to find candidates with pinpoint filters and Boolean search. Reference candidates based on previous evaluations, and then quickly scan resumes and send out automated interview emails with the industry’s best-in-class interview schedule platform.
#6. Confirm with your core schools what % of students have already accepted offers for ‘23.
Yello customers hire from schools across the country, and we partner with career centers to help their students find successful opportunities. This collaboration between Yello and career centers around the country is something we encourage all our customers to develop within their recruiting strategy.
If your company has less resources this year, or you’re simply late to the game, Yello can help with campus planning so you can be more strategic with your efforts, saving you time and money on the road to achieving your spring recruiting goals.
#7. Engage with brand ambassadors on campus.
Word of mouth is still the best marketing tool, and that’s why Yello’s products keep employer branding at the heart of what the technology is meant to do. Since your company has worked hard to personalize communications with top early talent and identified those most passionate about your brand, it makes sense to focus more resources towards empowering students at the campuses that are part of your spring recruitment wishlist.
#8. Check to see if registration is complete for NSBE and National Black MBA conferences.
As more and more students and companies return to in-person events, your team may see a strong incentive to participate in events like NSBE and National Black MBA conferences. Events like these help raise the visibility of your organization, and can be the best way to connect with proactive early talent.
Companies leverage Yello to streamline their recruiting events by helping them go paperless (goodbye stacks of resumes), gather and report on event ROI, smoothly manage logistics and follow-up, and avoid recruiter burnout.
#9. Make sure requisitions are posted early enough so there is time to recruit, interview, and hire before start dates.
Hiring for brand-new positions takes more time than filling existing roles, so recruiters should prepare by calculating how long the entire recruitment process may take and clearly communicating that internally to assure the sourcing process begins on time.
Yello helps recruiters leverage recruitment automation and metrics, like average time to hire, that can help recruiters plan for and standardize processes for requisitions.
#10. Ensure all of your candidate benefit collateral is up to date (relocation, transportation, etc).
Creating a smooth and exciting candidate experience has helped Yello customers meet and exceed their goals in years past. The technology that powers Yello helps recruiters ditch the endless spreadsheets and frustrating manual interview scheduling, leaving them with more time to focus on what really matters, telling your story.
Candidates don’t want to navigate clunky application workflows or juggle tons of emails. They want to meet you, learn about your organization, and find out why the opportunity you’re presenting should be their first choice. Yello helps companies get from hello to hired, faster and easier.
#11. Enter all of the events you are attending in Yello, even if they are hosted on other platforms, so that all of your candidates exist in one place where you can easily communicate with them and track ROI.
Yello helps you bring your entire recruiting process into one place. For companies wanting to use their existing solutions, Yello also integrates with your ATS and other tools like Microsoft Teams and more.
When combined with Yello’s ability to be highly customized and our team of experts ready to help you onboard and launch, it’s no surprise that leading HR tech providers work directly with Yello.
#12. Map out a process flow for events – Are they virtual? Are they in-person? How would you like candidates to interact with you?
Over the last couple of years and out of necessity, candidates and recruiters quickly adapted to virtual recruiting, and Yello was there to lead the charge. Then, we saw the rise of hybrid recruiting which gave companies and students more opportunities.
Now in 2023, the playing field is leveling out, and recruiters have the tools and experience to customize a recruitment strategy that works for them. Tightening budgets and turnover don’t have to mean your pipeline drags to a halt. Yello helps companies do more with less, without settling for simply good enough. With Yello, it’s easy to invite candidates, manage pre-registration, and follow up to promote attendance.
#13. Set up event registration and send the link out to your existing pipeline in Yello.
Are you planning a virtual event to increase diversity hiring in your early talent program? Or perhaps you’re planning on attending a fewer selection of core schools this year. Whatever your 2023 strategy requires, Yello makes it easy to message and engage with the right talent. Contact talent by location, major, and/or specific self-reported data.
#14. Confirm which staff are planning to attend events and share training materials with them to ensure they are up to speed on how to use Yello Pro to interact with and evaluate candidates.
We offer all clients a dedicated implementation team that will be with you every step of the way. Leverage expertise from our project managers, solutions architects, and implementation, integration and services consultants. Implementation and integration packages can be scaled to match the size of your organization.
We’ll walk your team through the configuration process and help you with training and onboarding to assure success from day one and a frictionless adoption process.
#15. Ensure your iPads are working and updated to the latest iOS and Yello software.
We mentioned going paperless above and we meant it. Ditch paper resumes and all the time-consuming manual work that goes along with them. Yello runs smoothly on your tablet and allows recruiters to quickly scan, ingest, and qualify candidates on the spot.
Post-event, recruiters have all the information within reach and easily searchable. What took recruiters hours before can be brought down to minutes. Go from hello to hired faster than ever before.