Yello helps recruiters achieve a high volume of early stage talent hiring during spring recruiting season, while providing the tools and technology to better manage each step of the process. From attracting top candidates through early stage talent sourcing to managing offers and engagement, Yello enables recruiters to surpass their spring recruiting goals for early talent acquisition.

We’ve tapped our recruiting experts and compiled the best tips on how to achieve your early career hiring goals this year. We’ll also help you navigate what’s new for 2024! 

#1. Analyze Current Early Career Recruiting Funnel to Set Spring Recruiting Goals for Recruiters

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 millions of active 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 the most accurate and compliant. 

With WayUp-managed events, our team does all the concierge 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 demographic data about how candidates are engaged. All your team needs to do is show up with the content you want to present! Many of our customers use these to drive engagement from a specific group of candidates to whom they are looking to attract and promote their brand or opportunities.

Yello & WayUp is the first all-in-one campus & diversity recruiting solution. Source diverse, qualified talent from our database of millions of active candidates–with 1 million added each year since 2021. Then engage, interview, and evaluate them without missing a beat.

#3. Post an early stage talent sourcing pipeline resume drop to begin collecting candidates for the fall season.

Students looking for spring recruiting internships today will be looking for full time opportunities in the fall. Leverage Yello’s tools for early stage talent sourcing 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 for spring recruiting goals for recruiters.

#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. Reference candidates based on previous evaluations for early stage talent sourcing, and then quickly scan resumes and send out automated interview emails with the industry’s best-in-class interview schedule platform for spring recruiting goals for recruiters. 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.
  • Use Abode to set up an internal “hiring journey” to engage the candidates and set them up with internal activities to complete. 

#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.

Yello has recently launched a new product, SkillsMatch, that uses AI to instantly match candidates in your existing pipeline to open roles based on their skills listed in their resumes. Recruiters can generate top-match candidate lists in seconds, then easily select and add candidates to automated campaigns to save significant time sourcing qualified early talent pipelines, enabling them to focus more on developing sourcing strategies rather than manual searching.

#6. Confirm with your core schools what % of students have already accepted offers for ‘24.

Yello clients 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. 

It is important to know that relying solely on core target schools limits your access to qualified talent from a wider range of institutions. Taking an agnostic approach enables connecting with top candidates anywhere and avoiding competition. While standardizing your data collection process via your own centralized tools allows greater flexibility and control when collaborating across numerous universities.

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, National Black MBA, Society of Women Engineers, and Grace Hopper.

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, National Black MBA, Society of Women Engineers, Grace Hopper 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 campus recruiters should prepare by calculating how long the entire recruitment process may take and clearly communicating that internally to ensure 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. 

#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 centralizes the spring recruiting process, integrating with ATS and tools like Microsoft Teams or Zoom to streamline communication and tracking, ensuring a cohesive approach to campus recruitment.

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. 

In 2024, 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. Yello also customizes and enables recruiters to optimize spring recruiting strategies based on event formats, ensuring effective interactions with early talent during campus recruitment.

#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 smaller selection of core schools this year. Whatever your 2024 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 devices are working and updated to the latest 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 facilitates paperless spring recruiting events, enabling quick scanning and ingestion of candidate information onsite, saving valuable hours post-event during campus recruitment.

With comprehensive recruitment tools and dedicated expertise, Yello enables organizations to achieve their most ambitious early stage talent sourcing and spring recruiting goals for recruiters. From AI-driven talent sourcing to integrated events and interviews, Yello optimizes each phase of the process, accelerating talent acquisition during campus recruitment. This allows recruiters to go from first contact to offer faster than ever before. If your team needs more resources and technology to acquire top early talent and hit your spring recruiting goals, leverage Yello’s end-to-end recruitment platform designed for ultimate speed and efficiency.