In today’s fast-moving campus recruitment landscape, it can sometimes be difficult to think beyond next month, let alone plan ahead a year or two. However, if you want to ensure that you have a continuous pipeline of top, diverse talent, it’s important that you invest in Early ID programs. But don’t worry. These programs don’t have to be overly complicated or take up too much of your time to be impactful.
During RippleMatch’s Fall User Conference, we shared some strategies for building out your Early ID plan without overloading your team. Here are the top takeaways from the presentation.
Investing in Early ID is Important for Many Reasons
Investing in Early ID can have a significant long term impact on your organization. It can also play a part in helping underrepresented candidates prepare for the workforce, whether at your organization or another. These efforts are critical for ensuring that diverse talent gets access to the same opportunities as their peers.
Build diverse pipelines
Early ID programs help you build diverse pipelines that you can recruit from for years. Invest in long-term relationships with candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, and you’ll be better positioned to hire these candidates when they’re ready to apply to jobs.
More prepared candidates
Invest in career development for young students to help them understand the skills they need to progress. This is particularly important for companies that hire for challenging roles where there may be a lack of qualified candidates.
Career path education
Help students discover opportunities and industries they didn’t know they could pursue. Students often don’t understand all the roles that are available to candidates with their background. By educating them early, you’ll find more candidates excited to apply for your positions.
Engaged candidate base
Instead of starting from scratch each year, you can have a base of warm candidates to promote opportunities to. Marketing and building your employer brand is expensive. It’s easier to recruit candidates who have engaged with you for months or years than those who just heard about you a week ago.
Barriers to investing heavily in Early ID strategies
Early ID programs can have big dividends, but they can be challenging to implement for a number of reasons.
Resourcing & bandwidth
Between internships, recruitment events, interviewing, and extending offers, investing in early ID can be tough. It’s easier to justify allocating resources to activities that have immediate results.
Choosing where to target
You can’t be everywhere or engage with everyone. When starting an Early ID program from scratch, it can be challenging to determine if you should take a targeted approach or cast a wide net.
Engagement over time
Even if you meet promising freshmen and sophomores, keeping track and engaging meaningfully is a challenge. Without the proper processes in place, your efforts to engage students early can go to waste.
Lack of content assets
Even with a library of recruitment assets, the initial investment in events, content & programming for early ID is a big lift.
Tips For Crafting Your Early ID Strategy
When first coming up with your Early ID Strategy, it’s important to audit where you have historically lacked representation. Identify the hiring areas where you have the most need, as that’s where you can best justify allocating resources. You may also find that existing resources can help your Early ID strategy with just a few small tweaks. For example, you might be able to leverage existing partnerships to identify candidates, or you may find you can use existing collateral for Early ID activities.
It’s also important that you don’t take on more than you can have the bandwidth for. Hosting a lot of early ID events or forming partnerships is great, but only if you have the structure to adequately nurture the candidates over time. Of course, you should also set clear expectations. Don’t expect clear results right away. Allocating time and energy to connect with young talent won’t have a clear ROI immediately, but chances are you will see big results in the future.
Types of Early ID Activities
Events
Make the most of your resources by opening up your existing events to younger students. If you’re hosting an information session on your industry or role type, invite freshmen and sophomores to attend, as well. Then create a separate post-event follow-up to engage those students. You can also adapt existing events on topics like diversity or company culture for your Early ID programs, making it easy to reach younger students without having to reinvent the wheel.
Partnerships
Take stock of your partnerships with student organizations and universities and see if you can sponsor an event or initiative for younger students. Identify your biggest gaps in representation and seek out at least one new partnership to help build that pipeline over the long-term.
Engagement over time
One of the biggest challenges with Early ID programs is keeping in contact with students after you first engage them. Centralize students’ contact information and plan out communication, such as a newsletter sent every 3 months, with relevant content and events. Explore technology solutions, like RippleMatch’s CRM or marketing platforms like HubSpot, to make engagement less manual.
Branding & collateral
Ensure that you have at least one document or webpage on hand that highlights early careers at your company, your culture, and the benefits of working there. Include a section on how students can stay in the loop if it’s too early to apply. By investing in employer branding that speaks to the priorities of Gen Z, such as career development, flexibility, and community, you’ll not only appeal to students applying to your roles now, but those considering future opportunities.
Credera’s Approach to Early ID
RippleMatch partner, Credera, shared with us how they have approached Early ID. Here are their top takeaways.
Not just early engagement, but ongoing
Credera believes the key to building long-term relationships is ongoing engagement throughout the entirety of the year, not just during the busy season. The team hosts events and invests in different components of branding throughout the year to get on students’ radar at all times and keep the momentum going.
Treat every candidate like they are the best-fit candidate
Instead of getting automatically filtered out, freshmen and sophomores are encouraged to stay in touch. Their Early ID events are geared towards education and career development rather than selling Credera as a firm, ensuring that students leave with new skills and perspectives they could apply to other career paths.
Credera’s Early ID Tactics
By investing in strategic branding initiatives, Credera ensures that they can put their best foot forward with students virtually and provide early talent with robust resources to learn about—and stay interested in—their opportunities.
‘Connect with Credera’ Event Series
Credera hosts large, nationwide events for students to learn about the company and the industry, allowing them to learn about opportunities well in advance of when they’ll start applying.
Robust content library and collateral
Credera has created over 100 PowerPoint presentations that different individuals involved in campus recruitment can leverage for various events or meetings, such as info sessions or presentations for underclassmen. They’ve also created a number of one-pagers on ERGs and company initiatives to easily share with students, and maintain an active company Instagram to share their company culture.
Targeted events with student organizations
Credera also sponsors small events with targeted campus organizations that are open to students in any year.
Intentional campus visits
Credera approaches in-person trips strategically in order to build meaningful relationships with target schools and get the most out of their time. They meet with professors and career services, table, hand out swag on campus, and set up recruiting and early ID info sessions all during one trip.
How RippleMatch’s CRM Tool Supports Credera’s Early ID Strategy
RippleMatch’s new Candidate Relationship Management tool is a game-changer for Credera’s ability to tackle early ID effortlessly. Through its community and campaigns functionality, the RippleMatch CRM helps organize contacts and engage with them over long periods of time.
No more spreadsheets
To keep track of contacts, including promising freshmen and sophomores, the Credera team previously maintained more than twenty spreadsheets, each containing 10-15 tabs. By implementing RippleMatch CRM, they’ve been able to move all manual student tracking over to a live-updating system with messaging capabilities.
Early ID & other intentional communities
Credera has set up communities within RippleMatch CRM to easily engage with students. Some of these communities include:
• Freshmen & sophomores community (coming soon)
• Intern community (currently juniors and below)
• Entry-level community (seniors)
• Accepted offers community (students who accept offers, prior to start date)
Leverage ongoing campaigns to communicate with promising young talent
By directing freshman and sophomore students to join their community, Credera can craft strategic communication to keep students in the loop about events, company news, and, eventually, applications.
Developing an Early ID strategy doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With some intentional planning, you can identify your biggest areas of need and figure out which existing resources you can use to reach students earlier. Add in tools to help you track students and keep them engaged, and you have a plan!