The Agnostic Approach That Will Boost Your Campus Recruiting Strategy
With the rise of virtual recruiting over the past year, employers realized they’ve been able to work with more schools than ever before. This has accelerated the move toward an agnostic recruiting process, where employers are considering more schools, recognizing more majors, and rebuilding their tech stacks to support more data coming from anywhere.
The case for agnostic
The advantage of being able to connect with any and every school is obvious: a greater ability to reach diverse and niche candidates who may have been in limited supply at in-person target schools. In addition, considering more diverse fields of study further expands your candidate pool. But, many are missing the critical third leg of the stool: taking a technology-agnostic position that gives you more control over your process.
Yello’s 2021 Fall Campus Recruiting Survey found that 53% of recruiters aren’t happy with the tools being offered by universities, as they take too much time for their teams to learn and effectively use. As the average number of schools they’re recruiting from grows, so does the pain of information collection and management. Now, many are reworking their tech stack and investing in tools that can support data coming in from anywhere.
Standardize your data collection process
You should be using your own technology as much as possible, rather than solely relying on university-provided tools. With a robust platform that accepts information from numerous on-campus and virtual events, you’ll gain greater insight over the totality of your recruiting process.
Using university-required tools doesn’t mean you can’t point candidates to your own system. Rather than collecting information on the school’s platform, include links that point candidates toward registration or application forms connected to your database. That way you can reach the same audience, but have all data fed into one centralized place.
At the same time, should a university require data from you, you can still run the reports necessary to match their own desired format. With such seamless information capture and transfer on your end, you have more control over your data and the candidate experience, not to mention, increased flexibility to work with schools across the country.
Think outside the career center
Keep in mind you can also take an agnostic approach to a school’s career center itself. You may be able to cultivate more targeted candidates by building direct relationships on your own with university departments, student groups, diversity programs, and individual professors or deans. The quality niche talent you seek doesn’t necessarily attend campus career fairs or use the career center’s resources — and you don’t want to pass them up.