Strategic campus hiring is on the rise.
Savvy HR leaders are redoubling their efforts to find new talent for current and future organizational needs. Steve Tiufekchiev, Chief Evangelist at Yello, recently conducted a webinar for Cielo where he shared the key to improving hiring success at colleges and universities.
Campus Hiring is Booming
In April of 2015, CareerBuilder surveyed approximately 2,200 hiring managers. Of that group, 65% plan to hire one or more graduates this year. Along similar lines, a study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) predicts that the job outlook for graduates will increase by 9.6% this year. The same study states that more than 30% of employers plan to offer bigger salaries to this new generation of talent. STEM skills are in high demand – especially accounting, computer science, engineering and finance.
This is great news for graduates, but for HR and talent acquisition leaders, it means competition for graduate talent is getting even tougher.
Metrics are Essential to Creating a Business Case for Campus Recruiting
Numbers are the language of business. One of the major challenges HR and talent acquisition leaders face is an inability to leverage metrics effectively in discussions with business partners and members of the C-suite. So as counterintuitive as it may seem for people persons, it is important for you to become comfortable with statistics and percentages.
But numbers mean nothing on their own. You must have a plan in place and targets to reach before you can use them to make a business case for improving your campus recruiting efforts. Tiufekchiev says investing in or developing a framework to define and track your goals, benchmark your performance, maintain your focus and gain a basis for more detailed planning is an essential step toward making your case.
Technology Has Unleashed New Metric-Collecting Capabilities
In the past, there was major lag time between live events such as campus career fairs and data analysis sessions. But technology has changed that. Now, mobile recruiting solutions provide digital sign-in forms that allow you to track prospects in real time. You can quickly see who approached your booth and spoke with a representative, and who walked away. Not only that, but you can dig further to compare and contrast graduates’ GPAs, majors and other pertinent data against the actions they take. This information often leads to insights and “aha” moments that can fundamentally change your approach to campus recruiting.
It has become trivial to obtain figures previously seen as unpractical, such as cost-per-candidate, by measuring the number of students hired against the cost of the event. These numbers can serve to strengthen your business case.
How to Develop Your Strategic Campus Recruiting Plan
Tiufekchiev stressed the importance of having a strategic plan by putting it this way, “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know you’ve arrived?” There are three key steps, he says, to developing your strategic plan:
- Define Strategic Goals (the “What”)
- Define the Execution Strategy (the “How”)
- Establish Measureable Metrics (the “End Game”)
For example, the “what” could be raising the number of employees certified to conduct campus interviews from an existing level of 20%, the “how” could be sponsoring monthly interviewer training sessions, and the “end game” might be increasing the percentage of trained interviewers to 60% by year end.
No matter what your plan looks like, it is important that the metrics you gather clearly relate to your goals and objectives. They must be unambiguous, actionable and in your control. This is the only way you can communicate the importance of a campus recruiting initiative to your organization’s hiring managers and executives.
Tiufekchiev references NACE’s Professional Standards for University Relations and Recruiting as an essential guide to campus recruiting, as well as ERE.net’s Metrics for Assessing College-Hire Effectiveness and ROI. These are incredibly useful starting points to work with as you prepare to outwit and out-recruit organizations that are fiercely pursuing the best new talent on campuses worldwide.
Watch Tiufekchiev’s full webinar for more details, links to resources and a Yello sample client case study: Back to School: The ABCs of Campus Recruiting Metrics.