Balancing a School-Agnostic and Target-Schools Recruitment Strategy
For many years, companies focused their early career recruiting efforts on a core set of target schools. Fall recruitment season would be filled with trips to campuses for endless career fairs and interviews. Almost all hiring for internships and entry-level positions came from the same schools, year after year.
Due in large part to an increased focus on diversity hiring, some companies have been shifting away from the target school model in recent years. But almost everyone was forced to figure out different ways of recruiting when campuses and offices closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even the most traditional companies were forced to move their recruiting online, naturally expanding their efforts away from their core schools in the process.
As part of RippleMatch’s 2021 Fall User Conference, we held a Community Workshop with members of the campus recruiting community to learn how they have balanced this new approach with their target school strategy. Here are the top takeaways from the discussion.
Identify Your Best Fit Schools
Although the participants of our Community Workshop work at a wide variety of organizations, each with a different level of reliance on target schools, they all agreed on one thing—it’s critical that you focus your efforts on your best fit schools. What that means can differ by organization, but it’s important that you think long-term when identifying these core schools.
The first step in identifying your top schools is to look at past data. If you have a strong partnership with certain schools and have traditionally recruited a large number of students from those schools, it’s likely that you will want to continue working with them.
Another important factor to consider, especially when looking at new target schools where you don’t have historical data to reference, is the strength of the college’s different programs. For example, if you’re hiring more female software engineers, you might want to focus on women’s colleges with strong computer science programs. This is even more critical for companies in niche industries, like fashion, where only a handful of schools have majors related to the field.
The location of the colleges you’re considering is also something to think about. If your company is located in a city where a lot of local talent attends nearby schools, it’s probably worthwhile to work with those schools. Not only will you get to give back to the local community, but it will be more cost effective to attend events at those schools, and you may see higher acceptance and retention rates with employees who already live in the area.
Finally, when deciding on your target schools, factor in the diversity of their student population. Many companies look to partner with HBCUs and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) for diversity hiring, but it’s important to recognize that large universities often have diverse student populations and produce great talent. Consider adding some public universities with large and diverse student bases to your target school list, as well. Bonus points if that public university is located in your local area!
Identify Schools That Haven’t Worked
Just as important as figuring out which schools are your highest priority, is identifying those that no longer fit your goals or strategy. While you’re going through your data, you may realize that certain colleges you’ve had long-term partnerships with just haven’t given you the results you would expect. With so many ways to reach students virtually, there’s no need to continue partnerships with schools that aren’t working out anymore.
When analyzing your data, make sure to go beyond surface-level results. You may find that you recruit a large number of interns from a specific college, but very few of those students end up accepting offers to work with you full time. If your goal is to retain hires for the long term, you may want to reduce your reliance on that school.
You might also find that recruiting heavily from certain schools is making it difficult for you to increase representation at the entry-level. If the programs you’re hiring from lack diversity in their student population, that’s going to reflect in your hires. If that’s the case, you should consider focusing more on school-agnostic strategies rather than continuing your partnerships with those schools.
Consider Other Aspects of the Partnership
When making your final decisions about which schools to partner with, it’s important to analyze the partnership itself. Even if a university ticks a lot of boxes that you’re looking for, it might not be right for you if you can’t develop a strong symbiotic relationship with the school.
For example, some colleges charge thousands of dollars just for access to a couple career fairs a year. That may have worked well for you in the past, but with the ability to easily reach talented students across the country via tools like RippleMatch, large scale events may no longer be at a top priority.
On the other hand, if a college works with you to develop relationships with professors and campus organizations, in addition to giving you access to events, it’s likely to be a much more valuable partnership.
Don’t Discount Barriers to Success
When evaluating colleges, it’s important to consider barriers that may put students at certain disadvantages if you were to look purely at data. For example, elite institutions are known to inflate grades, leading to higher average GPAs. This can make it difficult to make a direct comparison between students at different universities.
Some schools also have better access to resources than others, which puts students at smaller schools at a disadvantage, particularly in computer science-related fields. Students from elite schools might be more career-ready, but if you only hire those students you could be missing out on fantastic talent in the long-term. One recruiter at a tech company recommended considering students’ potential, not just their college projects and current skills, when hiring new grads. It’s important to plan for success beyond employees’ first few months on the job, and looking at potential can help you do that.
Get Buy-In From Leadership
Of course, one of the primary challenges you’ll face when moving towards a school agnostic approach is getting your leadership on board. In our discussion, almost every participant mentioned facing pushback from executives when trying to move away from a school-first approach. The key to getting buy-in is leveraging your data.
For many leaders, school-first recruiting is all they know. They may want to hire more students from their alma mater, or they don’t see any issues in what the company has done for years—after all, the roles were ultimately filled. That’s why it’s critical that you come prepared with data showing how the current strategy is leading to gaps in representation or that you’re seeing a low ROI from specific activities. If you’ve already put in the effort to establish which schools are really worth working with and which haven’t shown good results for your company, then you should have more than enough information to tell your story.
If you still receive pushback after making your case simply because there’s a strong willingness to bring in alumni from executives’ alma maters, then consider changing how you recruit at those schools. Leverage other alumni at your company to serve as brand ambassadors at those colleges. They can hold info sessions on their own, allowing you to maintain connections with the school without burdening your campus team and at a much lower cost.
Increase Targeted Events and Sourcing
When lessening the reliance on target school in your recruiting strategy, it’s important that you replace your school-based activities with targeted events and intentional sourcing. First, identify areas that you’re struggling to support with your school approach, then figure out how to fill those gaps with other activities.
For instance, if you realize that you’re not hiring enough women engineers, you can look to source more female engineering graduates through tools like RippleMatch. You can also hold virtual events targeted specifically at women in engineering, and even look to begin an early ID program to build your pipeline.
One of the greatest benefits of a school-agnostic approach to recruiting is that you have more control over your activities and events, tailoring them to your needs, not to college schedules. This gives you more flexibility with everything from when you host events, to who you invite, to the content of your programming. It will allow you to not only reach a broader candidate pool, but direct your attention to candidates who are better fits for your company.
Find Your Balance
Figuring out what percentage of your time and efforts to put into recruiting at target schools vs school agnostic activities will take some trial and error. After doing things one way for many years, it’s not expected that you’ll suddenly be able to shift all of your efforts to a new approach and see immediate results. But if you continue to evaluate which partnerships are truly valuable, and see how much great talent you can recruit without stepping foot on a college campus, you’ll begin to figure out where to distribute your efforts.
Interested in more insights from our Fall User Conference? Click here to access all of the session recording and presentations.
