Some multi-faceted stakeholders are actively involved in driving a scalable campus recruitment process. These include (but are not limited to):
Enterprises: Typically, medium- and large-sized companies are the ones that engage in campus recruitment to cater to their ever-growing talent needs.
College career development centers: Most colleges have a dedicated team to help students transition to the professional world. These development centers also aid in job search, particularly for alums.
College students: The last yet most important piece of the recruitment puzzle are the students themselves. Interestingly, most students start scouting for jobs and do their homework in the first year. So if you want top-of-the-mind recognition, you need to start building relationships with the candidates early on.
Senior leadership and managers: Managers can drive various recruitment activities - from defining job descriptions to interviewing candidates.
Employees from other disciplines: Generally, you'll find employees belonging to specific departments (think: IT, marketing, legal, etc.) also join the campus recruitment team as they scout for candidates for their unique area of responsibility. Furthermore, you also need representatives from the operations and IT teams to facilitate a seamless hiring process.
Recruitment marketing firms: To take their recruitment game to the next level, some organizations take the help of recruitment marketing firms to create and launch employer brands. This can significantly boost your organization's image in the prospective candidate's mind.
Campus recruitment tools: Every organization understands the importance of automating the time-intensive, routine work that comes with recruiting. This is where campus recruitment tools can augment your team's effort by literally taking off some repetitive and administrative workloads.
Campus recruiters: Some organizations hire dedicated campus recruiters to source interns and college graduates. In other cases, organizations integrate campus recruiting skills into the HR expert's job responsibility. Whatever the case, campus recruiters form an integral part of the recruitment process and don multiple hats.
Here's a quick run-through of the diverse tasks and responsibilities a campus recruiter undertakes:
They dedicate time to identifying, engaging, and hiring students full-time.
They demonstrate wide-ranging skills such as strategy, relationship building, marketing, etc.
They define staffing needs, budgeting requirements, and calendar events to build a future-proof campus recruitment strategy.
They work on creating on-point job descriptions and interview questions, focus on narrowing down the right assessment tools, and list job offers.
They engage in an ongoing relationship-building effort with campus staff.
They think of out-of-the-box solutions (think: presentations, videos, flyers, and other marketing collaterals) for brand promotions centered around job opportunities.
Depending on the organizational needs, they drive recruiting events and career fairs (in-person and virtually).
They help candidates throughout the recruitment process - from the interview to hiring and onboarding.
They monitor and manage talent communities as well as ongoing job-related communications.
They track recruitment success and strategize on areas of improvement as well as growth.
The learning:
Remember that all these players and components ultimately come together to play an integral role in driving successful campus recruitment. For a seamless recruitment workflow, the campus recruiter needs to coordinate and communicate with all the key players and manage moving parts from end to end. In simpler words, campus recruitment cannot occur in isolation; it needs a village to make it work.
