Talent acquisition teams need a campus recruiting strategy that addresses the organization’s needs as well as the realities of the early-career talent market. The average age of a full-time undergraduate student is 23 years old – that’s Generation Z, for those keeping score. And today’s young adults are driving shifts in the workplace – and in recruiting – that employers need to embrace in order to earn their attention, time and trust.
For these early-career job seekers, candidate experience reigns supreme. Everything about your campus recruiting strategy should prioritize candidate experience, while maximizing the benefits in other areas, such as controlling costs, increasing candidate engagement and reducing ghosting. In this article, we’ll explore:
- What makes up an effective campus recruiting strategy
- The benefits of virtual tools for campus recruiting
- How to choose the right campus recruiting solution
- The elements of an effective campus recruiting strategy
Employers will have slightly different approaches to campus recruiting, depending on their industry, location and hiring goals. But all campus recruiting strategies that work have several common components.
A Combination of In-Person and Virtual Events
We know that 83% of job seekers prefer virtual recruiting events, and younger generations are the most likely to opt for a recruiting experience that allows them to engage when and how they are most comfortable. This means having a virtual element in your recruiting process is necessary to compete for their attention. However, with the right solution in place, you don’t need to choose between virtual recruiting and in-person hiring events. In fact, there are many ways a virtual recruiting solution can improve your in-person hiring. Creating a campus recruiting strategy that leverages the power of both virtual and in-person recruiting events and centralizes all your hiring event data from one technology solution can be a powerful way to scale and measure your campus recruiting reach – and impact.
Speed and Efficiency
Today’s college students and recent graduates live fast-paced lives. When it comes to their job search, they expect things to move just as quickly. Employers have to work smarter to keep candidates engaged long enough to evaluate their skills and potential, especially since unemployment rates among recent grads are trending lower than the average for all workers. Virtual recruiting events – especially with a one-and-done model – are a cost-effective way to accelerate the hiring process without sacrificing candidate experience.
The Right Campus Recruitment Technology
Campus recruiting, just like other forms of recruiting, won’t work well if your team is bogged down by cumbersome tools or if their time is consumed by administrative tasks. Using the right tools, such as the Radancy Talent Acquisition Cloud, as part of your full-funnel campus recruiting strategy puts you miles ahead of competitors who may still be using spreadsheets, email attachments and sticky notes to track insights on candidates from career fairs and communicate with hiring managers.
Benefits of Virtual Tools For Campus Recruiting
Whether you want to launch a full-funnel virtual recruiting process, supplement your in-person hiring events with virtual tools, or adopt a fully hybrid campus recruiting model that leverages both in-person and virtual opportunities to connect with early-career talent, you can reap the benefits of virtual recruiting. Virtual recruiting solutions offer a range of advantages that help employers compete for early-career talent.
Expand Your Geographic Reach With Virtual Hiring Events
Don’t limit your talent pool to a small radius of local zip codes. With virtual recruiting, you can meet college students and grads in other cities and states – something very difficult to do with traditional recruiting strategies. Specifically, hosting virtual recruiting events is an effective way to erase geographic barriers and reach more candidates.
Reduce Stress and Expenses
Virtual recruiting events require zero travel, zero venue fees, zero equipment rental, zero refreshments and zero time out of the office. Radancy customers consistently report on the many ways virtual recruiting has given recruiters their time back, freeing up hours and mental energy to invest in meaningful conversations and relationships with candidates.
Add More Schools to Your Talent Pool
With a traditional onsite-only campus recruiting strategy, your reach is limited by the number of schools your team can physically visit. Virtual recruiting allows you to break free from those restrictions and engage with schools across the country, even all at the same time. And better yet, a hybrid approach equips you to leverage virtual and onsite events in a fully strategic, year-round early-career talent engagement and pipeline-building strategy. On a recent webinar, one customer shared their list of target schools and the total number of campuses represented in their campus talent database – which have both increased exponentially since adopting virtual hiring events, enabling their campus recruiting team to completely overhaul their approach to what schools they are targeting, and how they are evaluating their programs, in order to drive enhanced results over time.
Improve Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Outcomes
With the expanded reach virtual recruiting affords, it becomes easier to diversify your talent pipeline. Provided your team follows best practices for DEIB recruiting, your results are likely to improve. In addition to this, the ability to scale consistent messaging, branded candidate experiences, and values alignment with early-career talent means that many of our customers are also evolving their approach to DEIB in campus recruiting.
For example, many top companies using Radancy’s Hiring Events have found success creating an ongoing year-round cadence of DEIB events to connect students with their employee resource groups (ERGs) and show, rather than tell, their organization’s approach not just to diversity, but also equity, inclusion and belonging. By connecting students to these employee groups, they are bringing their employer brand to life in a way that is authentic and accessible to Gen Z students and job seekers.
Elevate Candidate Engagement and Satisfaction
A virtual recruiting solution helps you deliver a highly engaging candidate experience, and streamlining your overall recruiting process can boost engagement, too. Radancy’s Hiring Events customers frequently report higher levels of candidate satisfaction and engagement, and many have also seen an improvement in reducing candidate ghosting by using hiring events to create opportunities for conversation, connection and an overall faster and more satisfying experience for candidates.
Choosing the Right Campus Recruiting Solution
Choosing the right campus recruiting solution to execute your hiring strategy starts with understanding your needs and asking vendors the right questions, so you can deploy a scalable solution that supports all your hiring goals. Here’s an idea of what to look for in a campus recruiting solution, as well as the features you need to scale and support a modern campus recruiting approach.
What to Look For in Campus Recruiting Software
Ask these questions before partnering with a campus recruiting technology vendor:
- How much experience does this vendor have in campus recruiting?
- How do they protect user data from cybersecurity breaches or attacks?
- What specific services does this vendor offer?
- How much and what kind of customer support is available?
- Is the software easy to use with little or no training?
- Does the campus recruiting technology support native live video streaming?
- Can I customize hiring events and registration pages to reflect my organization’s brand with custom colors/logos, etc.?
- Is the solution mobile-friendly?
- Can I create event templates to save time when hosting a series of similar events?
- What metrics are tracked to help me improve my campus recruiting efforts?
Campus Recruiting Software Features
Here are some of the features the best campus recruiting solutions offer:
- Ability to host virtual and in-person hiring events
- Features to help promote your campus recruiting events
- Built-in candidate rating system
- Tracking and measurement features
- Automated tools for post-event communication
- Features that make in-person hiring events more efficient
Improve Your Campus Recruiting ROI
Following these best practices gives you the power to create a campus recruiting strategy that targets your hiring goals, offers maximum returns and delivers the top-notch candidate experience that today’s college students and graduates deserve. And, best of all, virtual recruiting tools are flexible and scalable, so you’ll be better prepared to adapt to challenges in the future, without losing momentum.
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