Articles 
Companies that want to fuel innovation and growth should look to attract the best of tomorrow’s talent, today.
One way organizations can put their brands front and center early on while gaining a strategic advantage is through the right campus recruiting technology. A robust engagement strategy won’t bear significant fruit without the right campus recruiting technology and tools in place.
Here are 5 key considerations that you should take into account when looking for the right campus recruiting technology vendor.
1. Dedicated Campus Recruiting Technology That’s Fit For Purpose
In the US alone, 21 million students enrolled in college in the fall of last year – a whopping 5 million increase since 2020. Learning how to attract, engage and convert this growing segment on such a large scale requires more than just a stand-alone recruiting solution, such as an ATS or a CRM.
Despite modern-day SaaS technology and integration advancements, those who implement these solutions fail to take into account that graduate recruitment has a longer lead time from source to hire (often four years or more).
Furthermore, campus recruiting entails very different processes and stakeholders than normal recruiting channels; it demands a combination of recruiting, event management and recruitment marketing techniques.
These areas have very diverse activities, from collecting and screening résumés to managing the promotion of a number of recruiting events, event logistics, cost tracking, registration and engagement.
To navigate both the complexities and opportunities presented on campus, your recruiters need bespoke technology that marries these seemingly disconnected areas with real-time collaboration tools. These will ultimately give your team the power to flex your processes to specific recruitment needs or address critical talent segments on the go.
2. Engagement Workflows to Build Relationships
Many organizations are successfully leveraging their career sites, email marketing and SMS channels to stay in touch with students. However, the campus recruiting technology platforms that truly allow recruiters to nurture their relationships with thousands of students and add real engagement power to their recruiting strategies are the ones that put workflow configuration, advanced segmentation and personalization tools into their hands.
With these tools, recruiters can build sophisticated communication workflows based on conditional triggers that leverage information within your database, including graduation date, end of exams season, registration to an event or a talent pool and even inactivity. Through smart automation, you can easily achieve short, medium and long-term engagement.
For example, every January, you may send a company newsletter to your student database. Recruiters could set a workflow condition that recognizes if a second-year student only clicks on an internship-related link. That could then trigger a follow-up email inviting them to find out more about internships at your organization and also send an email to the recruiter in charge of interns to make contact.
At the same time, you may have met a student at an event who seemed very interested in your organization, but sadly, they haven’t interacted with any of your campaigns following that event. After a certain period of inactivity, this could trigger an email to a recruiter to give them a call and see if their interests have changed.
3. Campus Recruiting Technology that Empowers Agile Recruiters
Recruiters nowadays need more than a strong brand and employee value proposition.
They must possess a level of agility that enables them to personalize the recruiting process on an individual or segment basis. They also need to respond to fluctuating market conditions and internal talent demand by being able to adapt their recruitment processes and deploy audience-specific content at a moment’s notice.
Agile campus recruiters know that the key to efficient recruiting and high-quality candidate experiences is campus recruiting technology that supports your processes before, on-site and after the event.
For example, recruiters drum up interest before events using social media, email and SMS campaigns, giving candidates the information they need. With landing pages, they also capture candidate information ahead of time, allowing recruiters to have a clear overview of the type of students they will meet at the event.
Once on campus, the right technology makes manual, paper-based approaches a thing of the past, enhancing the experience for everyone. Having done everything digitally and in real-time, there’s no more lugging paper resumes back home. The job is done.
“Recruiters now have the ability not only to capture their own notes in the portal but also to capture a ranking scale and candidate areas of interest. Post-event, we can then pull metrics from that information. We can see how many students we’re interested in for marketing and communication efforts. That has been really helpful to us.” – Tessa Dolkas, NuVasive
NuVasive used to have a manual process, entering resume information into their ATS following an event. By implementing Avature, they’ve transformed their entire process and experience.
“We streamlined the process so when you’re at the event, it’s easy. There are no resumes, it’s just a quick entering of information, handing the iPad back, giving a rating, and after, everything is automated. So there are no stacks of resumes that you’re trying to get back home.” – Kate Blue, NuVasive
Duke Energy has also looked to remain agile during campus events. To do so, recruiters can use Avature without relying on WIFI and can register students, conduct interviews, do on-the-spot screenings, add student feedback notes and rank students. There is no fear of losing the information collected – once internet connectivity is restored, everything is saved in Avature automatically.
4. Campus Recruiting Technology that Allows Advanced Database Search Functionality and Quick Screening
The very nature of graduate recruitment means your database constantly evolves and expands. Advanced search functionality, including AI-powered suggestions, in best-in-class solutions gives you the power to effortlessly segment, identify and manage your student database. However, accurately analyzing and selecting top potential talent still requires a human touch.
As a recruiter or hiring manager, you need to clearly see the most meaningful data about each candidate to be able to act upon it. Your campus recruiting technology should allow you to create custom views to display any information in your database that’s important to you and your teams. That could be the school students attended, their GPA, their GMAT scores, their technical skills or even a preview of their resumes.
In addition, your recruiters should be able to view multiple candidate resumes and switch between them quickly without needing to download or open a document in a different screen, adding agility to the screening process and significantly improving candidate management.
For CBIZ Somerset, a manual approach that relied heavily on pen and paper meant the recruiting team lacked visibility of the candidates they talked to at events and a way to track them in real-time. When rethinking their campus recruiting strategy, they knew they needed to address these issues as well as apply consistency to their processes.
With Avature, they were able to implement campus recruiting technology that allowed them to record candidate data digitally on-site, seamlessly handling high volumes of information and providing a modern candidate experience aligned with students’ expectations.
In a competitive market, speed is of the essence. CBIZ Somerset no longer has to risk missing out on top talent as smart automation empowers them to reach out to every candidate with a personalized email within 24 hours of an event.
They also leveraged the platform’s segmentation features, pinpointing the most suitable candidates and taking proactive steps to target them with advertisements and invitations, thereby optimizing their opportunities for meaningful engagement.
5. Multi-Program Campus Recruiting Management
Campus, military, diversity and executive are just some of the different types of recruiting programs managed by talent acquisition teams today. Smart talent organizations that run multiple recruiting programs understand the need to deploy personalized, audience-specific sourcing strategies and engagement processes. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work because university candidates probably won’t be attracted using the same tactics and channels used for candidates with a military background.
These differences can make it difficult to appropriately manage, track and analyze candidate flow and compare program performance from one technology platform. This is particularly true if we consider that legacy recruiting systems don’t offer the flexibility or extensive customization required to meet the varying needs of each program. This is why it’s essential to choose a flexible campus recruiting technology that will allow you to build out and manage as many programs as you need to run simultaneously.
Managing everything from a single platform enables teams to consequently track, compare and analyze program performance, such as:
- The overall number and quality of sourced candidates per program.
- Engagement metrics to discover what works for each audience.
- Program spend versus the quality of candidates to determine ROI.
To Conclude
When looking to partner with a campus recruiting technology vendor, HR teams should look out for the tools that bring both flexibility and speed. No matter what changes, agile recruiting teams that have campus recruiting technology can better leverage internal resources, adjust workflows, deploy campaigns and be in the best position possible to attract and engage the brightest emerging talent.
