In this section, we will list a comprehensive campus recruitment checklist comprising of key campus hiring strategy and the campus hiring process, which you can keep handy to boost your hiring game.
Research to create a meaningful and results-oriented hiring plan: Comprehensive research and gaining insights into your business needs are key to your campus hiring strategy. To drive this, you need to:
Chalk out the key competencies and roles for new hire
List the top campuses you wish to target
Think about a campus recruiting partner (if required)
Map out the hiring process down to the tiniest details
Create a hiring plan based on insights into your organizational needs and relevant job positions
Work on receiving inputs from the senior leadership of various departments
Analyze the current attrition rates as well as the skill gaps in the key departments so that you can recruit accordingly
Integrating all these factors can pave the way for a viable hiring plan.
Select a hiring partner: If your hiring needs are extensive, think about hiring an experienced recruitment partner to lower the workload. This will help you access the right resources and frontload key tasks of the hiring process.
Build campus intelligence: The first step towards building campus intelligence entails gathering data and experiences of campuses based on past hiring and outcomes. You can provide scores to each campus in terms of key indicators such as student performance, preferred salary range, etc. You can also create a competency heat map, where every students’ performance is mapped against competencies prevalent in the industry. This data is further mapped to the core competency requirements of individual organizations.
Create a diverse recruitment team: Think of your recruitment team as symbolic of the brand's strengths and intrinsic culture. Hence, you need to have highly engaged employees on the team who understand the company’s goals and can represent your organization as authentically as possible. As a pro tip, remember to analyze your employee engagement strategies to understand which members to include within the recruitment program. Plus, you can ask the following questions to zero down on the right employees:
How many team members does your budget allow you to hire?
What kind of leadership positions does your recruiting team need?
How many on-the-ground campus recruiters will you need, and how many virtual recruiters will you need?
What kinds of roles, responsibilities, and skills will your recruiters be hiring for?
What locations and universities are you recruiting for?
Promote your campus recruitment strategy aggressively: A well-conceived promotion strategy encompasses diverse channels and mediums--from social media to the careers page of your website. You can also advertise your recruitment drive through rewarding programs and attract the right talent.
Advertise right: Rope in your marketing and creative teams to create engaging and compelling content for social media platforms, such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. You need to first understand where your target audience is and market to them in their language. Also, make sure to leverage wide-ranging content formats such as videos, banners, emails, etc., and drive traffic to different parts of your communication channel.
Focus on your Career's page: Your Career's page always needs to be up-to-the-mark, highlighting the company’s work culture, goals, advantages, rewards, etc. You can keep the content short and visually driven by leveraging images, employee videos, and infographics to tell a captivating story.
Build a campus ambassador program: The Campus Ambassador Program is an innovative way to improve brand awareness. Here's how this process works:
Build a student referral program: A student referral program can be a highly rewarding endeavor. Basically, you will need to build a program where you pay a referral fee to the current students, as the latter recommends potential candidates for vacant positions. When done right, it can greatly improve the hire quality and boost the time-to-hire. At the same time, you can benefit from improved brand awareness and positive word-of-mouth publicity.
Think of engagement strategies with students: For your campus recruitment process to be effective, you need to pre-engage students and connect with them throughout the year. There are innumerous ways to drive brand awareness, such as hosting an interactive webinar, conducting career fairs, driving engaging hackathons/ideathons, driving presentations by alumni, etc. Through these initiatives, you should be able to identify the candidate's abilities before the recruitment process begins.
Invest in robust tools to assess future candidates: Skills assessment is an integral part of the recruitment process. This is where assessment tools can positively impact your organization's hiring quality. It allows you to hire candidates based on potential instead of solely hiring them on experience. Moreover, you can evaluate and filter students more quickly and accurately and predict hiring outcomes with the right screening assessments and tools at hand. AI-powered remote proctoring tools can assess students on various skillsets such as aptitude, communication, domain expertise, personality traits, etc.
Conduct effective virtual structured interviews: Once you have shortlisted the candidates, you can drive structured interviews remotely for greater convenience. Interestingly, these virtual interviews are location-agnostic so you can reach out to a more global talent pool.
Drive virtual onboarding for retaining new hires: You need to create an interactive, straightforward, and stress-free onboarding process. Plus, you'll need to think about the infrastructural requirements such as laptops, headsets, etc. Additionally, you'll need to ensure that your new hire has all the information they need ready in their inbox before joining the company. You can also conduct virtual team bonding activities to acclimatize the new hire with the rest of the team and make them feel comfortable in the new environment.
Analyze the effectiveness of your campus hiring strategies: Finally, you'll need to assess whether your efforts are paying off. There are numerous metrics you can review based on your hiring goals and needs. Once you have all the insights, you can create a blueprint for future campus recruitment strategies--be it virtually or on-campus.
Additionally, here are a few other pointers to keep in mind when driving a fool proof campus recruitment plan:
Say goodbye to a script if you wish to make genuine connections during the recruitment drive. You'll have a better chance of retaining talent if the conversation feels natural and free-flowing.
Be approachable as a recruiter as, according to a study, 75% of Gen Z workers claim it's important to have a boss who can coach employees. As long as you offer guidance and support, you're good to go.
Focus on building a diverse workplace to create a talent pool of people with multi-dimensional, exceptional skills as well as diverse perspectives and backgrounds. This small effort can pay off huge dividends as research indicates that gender-diverse companies outperform other companies by 15%.
Assess a candidate's abilities beyond the written word. Factor in their skillset, backgrounds, and experiences.
Shift to a data-driven hiring process and, as a thumb rule, focus on creating a positive candidate experience at all times.
Partnering with universities to craft the best techniques to source candidates.
Always analyze your recruiting performance and develop a plan for the next steps.
The learning:
There is no 'one-size-fits-all' approach when it comes to creating a campus hiring process checklist. Some campus hiring strategies may work for some enterprises, whereas they may not work for others. At the end of the day, you need to create a blueprint that caters to your organizational needs and requirements in real-time.
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