According to Aptitude Research Partners, nearly 70% of companies are hiring new college graduates this year.

What does that mean for you and your team? More competition at career fairs, on-campus interviews and other key student hiring initiatives will likely become a bigger part of your recruiting strategy.

Why it matters

As the labor market becomes tighter, companies are looking downstream to hire top talent. That means more recruiters are headed to campus. In fact, the average employer attends 41 career fair events each year.

Even companies that don’t have a physical presence at schools are still making connections with students virtually. Yello client A.T. Kearney implemented digital recruiting events to increase candidate reach by 77%, all while cutting their number of on-campus events by more than half.

While it’s no secret that campus recruiters are used to the campus hiring season hustle, external competition and internal pipeline demands are at record highs. On top of that, many teams are still forced to work with limited resources or ineffective legacy processes — which might be why 41% of companies say their entry-level positions are hardest to fill.

How you can keep up

In our 2019 Recruiting Study, we polled hundreds of recruiters and candidates to find out how companies can recruit more effectively on campus. The first graduating class of Gen Z will join the workforce this year — and this generational shift has significant implications for campus recruiting teams. 

Today’s students prefer career fairs and other in-person campus recruiting events more than ever before. Gen Z is nearly twice as likely as millennials to say that hiring events and career center resources are their most valuable job search source.

Gen Z also students prefer face-to-face communication with recruiting teams more than any other medium. They’re much more likely than previous generations to value relationships with individual recruiters — with 44% saying it has the biggest impact on their ultimate decision to accept a job. 

Bottom line: In order to recruit on campus successfully, companies need to empower on-the-ground recruiters with the tools they need to break through the competition and eliminate tedious administrative work so they can focus on what really matters — building stronger relationships with students. 

Yello’s recruitment events solutions are built to streamline event logistics from planning to follow-up, so your team can engage candidates, maximize ROI and hire quality candidates faster. Here’s some of our most popular campus hiring features, and what current clients have to say about them: