If you are beginning your last year of college, don't put off the job search. Looking for a job can easily start to feel like a full-time job itself. Luckily, there are things you can do that fold into your daily or weekly lives that will help you land a job by the time you graduate.
Effectively capturing information at recruiting events.
Entry-level jobs and internships must be filled. Most of the time these positions are filled by college students looking for experience in the workforce. Most students, when wandering around career fairs, don't know what they are looking for so they hand out resumes to companies that sound interesting. This webinar helps students get the most out of career fairs and helps students feel welcome into the workforce.
In this recorded webinar, Andrea McEwen Henderson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreamcewen), former National Account Manager for College Recruiter, hosts Kevin George (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinngeorge), CEO and Co-Founder of HireCampus, who will explain how to effectively capture information at recruiting events.
Is there a line between too much data and too little data?
How important is following up?
Is there value in engaging employees to contribute to follow up?
How important is it to have information in real-time?
How do I reconcile event information with our prospect channels?
What does event level detail tell me?
How important are events for recruiting on campus?
These events on campus are very important to recruiting. Companies lose great opportunities to hire students into the workforce when they do not go to those events. As a result of these missed opportunities the company's competitor will have a better pick of students who want to work for them.
What is the point of organizing student information at events?
Just going to campus recruiting events will not help you understand which schools may be the best place for you to recruit. If, instead, you go and gather information about the students you talk to and keep it organized, it will be much clearer where you are most effective.
What are the right data points to collect at recruiting events?
One of the most basic data points to gather is contact information. To take it a step further, you're going to want to know their area of interest. Understanding the needs of the company will help you find the right data points, and what schools are the best fit for you.
There is a very fine line between too much data and too little data. Regardless of what type of event you are attending, the more data you gather the longer it takes. You don't want to create a bottle neck or frustrate students by asking for 25 data points. You definitely want to stick to the core, essential information like contact information, graduation date, major, and area of interest.
Following up is one of the most important steps in recruiting. You want to build relationships with these students so they feel a positive connection to your company. Most students are learning what the culture is like at different companies and by sending them an email with a hello and a thank you will help them feel more at ease.
Speed is an important aspect of following up. If you send an email to a student a week after the event, it won't be as relevant to them as if you did it the same day. Sending emails at frequent intervals can also help build that relationship with students. You are going to be offering competitive packages to these students, who no doubt have had multiple offers. The thing that will set you apart from the others is going to be the culture. If you follow up and are consistently emailing them, you will stand apart from the others and the student will feel warm about working at your company.
Having employees engaged and creating this culture of recruitment in a business is the most important thing you can do when approaching campus. The campus recruiter who speaks to many students, most at different schools and different fields of interest, will not provide the same level of connection as an employee who went to that school and can relate to the student's position. They can give the students that, "Hey, I was in your shoes, and I did the internship, and this is where I am today, and this is why it was such a good experience for me." That connection will give the students a deeper understanding of your company and set you apart from competitors.
The challenge with gathering information and looking at it in real time is being able to make decisions that could improve your current semester, not necessarily the one ahead. What I mean by that, to give an example, is to be able to look at a pipeline in real time and say, "Hey, we met 400 students from University A, but we've only seen 15 applications come through so far. Why don't we send out an email to all the students we met so far just to make them aware that the application is open? For all we know maybe it's buried on the school board. Maybe students are having trouble finding it, or maybe there is a technical error we don't know about." Understanding where you are in the process and where the pipeline is can inspire you to make some simple decisions that could have a big impact on how many people you end up hiring.
Events are not the only places you will meet with students. It's important to have the same data for each encounter so you can compare different prospects and decide who should be interviewed. Communication between the team and the top will help with these decisions and how to make the different encounters count.
Event level detail will help you understand how effective different events are and where the greatest return on investment is. If you are not getting down to that level of detail, it can be really difficult to determine if a career fair at NYU or an information session at Columbia is a better way of getting students interested.