8 University Recruiting Professionals Share Their Expert Tips For Making the Most of a Campus Visit
In today’s talent acquisition landscape, campus visits remain an essential tool in the arsenal of many university recruiting teams. Even with the emergence of new recruitment technologies, companies still recognize the value of meeting students face-to-face, strengthening employer brand, and continuing relationships with career centers.
However, every university recruiting team knows that between preparation, travel, executing each event, and regrouping after, campus visits are a time-intensive and costly undertaking. And with skilled college graduates in high demand, maximizing the time spent on campus is more important than ever.
In order to find and share the best advice for making the most of a campus visit, we went straight to the source and asked top university recruiting professionals what they believe are the most important factors of a successful campus visit.
From relationship management to having multiple touchpoints to tracking ROI, the following emerged as the key elements university talent teams should keep in mind when attending or planning future events:
Candice Clement McPhatter
Campus Talent Acquisition Partner, Lowe’s
“The pre-work you do before a campus visit is what sets you up for success. A large portion of that pre-work involves leveraging the points of contact you’ve acquired on each campus to promote attendance at your various events. Three to five months out from an event, I take stock of who I’m connected with at our target schools and determine which contacts will work best to help get the word out about an event.
This makes organization of those contacts essential. I keep a spreadsheet of all of my contacts, categorized by career services, professors, student organizations, and more. In addition to staying in touch with those contacts over email, I utilize LinkedIn to engage more frequently and continue networking.”
Annie Raeder
Lead Recruiter - Campus Recruiting, Guild Education
“When building a relationship with a campus and the students there, the various resume workshops and networking events are often overlooked as a great brand building opportunity. Participating in events to support the career services office like mock interviews and resume reviews allow students that may not have known about you or thought they could be a fit for your roles to get 1-1 time with you. It also is great to help give back to the students and the partners at the university. It is a win-win scenario!”
Char Delapena
University Recruiting Manager, Quora
“On-campus recruiting is such a great way to engage with students while building for brand awareness. But even as you form relationships and grow brand awareness, it’s important to have tracking in place to gather hard metrics to ensure you can measure the success of these visits. Leverage a platform that can track RSVPs and check-ins with ease, as well as track hires made so you can report on ROI. Metrics gathered this way will help when determining the target school list for the following season.
Identifying your goals and ensuring everyone is on the same page before the visit is essential too. Whether you're focusing on recruiting, brand awareness, or building for a future pipeline, make sure everyone who is coming on-campus is aligned so you're delivering the same message and representing the company in the best way possible.”
Jordan Bryant
Campus Recruiting Manager, Uline
“You used to be able to hire really good candidates through career fairs alone. However, I'm finding that we need to do a lot of relational work before and after career fairs to attract the best students. Attracting the top students requires multiple touch points and keeping your company's name and people in front of them through classroom presentations, networking events, career fairs and more. In campus recruiting, relationships are critical – when not at events, I spend most of my time cultivating relationships with key influencers such as faculty, staff, career centers, and student organizations.”
Chris Fitzpatrick
University Relations Manager, Crestron
“For my campus strategy, alumni teammates are key. Any company can have a tablecloth and a company rep at a Career Fair, but I always find it most impactful to have multiple alumni across different business lines attend with me. Current students identify with graduates of their school and tend to form a deeper connection with that company when they see a path to success. The alumni see it as a way of supporting the organization while simultaneously giving back to their alma mater. The school sees that the students they place have role models and mentors in place, and as a result feel more comfortable being evangelists for that company. Everybody wins!”
Alison
Campus Recruiting Manager at an Investment Bank
“The overarching theme of our on-campus events is that we are offering learning opportunities and ways for students to network. To reach the range of students we want, we have many different variations of events we plan, generally geared around these three focal points: Firm-wide (large-scale, multi-divisional events), diversity (events for female and racially/ethnically diverse students), and function-specific (something like a hackathon, case study or for banking specifically, trading projects).
Gone are the days of going to campus for one day and making either final round interview selections or even offers. We use our campus visits as a way to begin preparing students for what’s next, and to get them excited about starting their careers at our company.”
Paul S. Baik
University Talent Acquisition Partner, TripActions
“To have a successful campus visit, I believe in preparing months ahead in order to maximize the interaction potential with students and potential candidates, as well as including multiple touchpoints. For example, I've found that when working with student organizations, doing an introductory/informative webinar prior to ever setting foot on campus is extremely helpful. It boosts attendance, it creates excitement, and now you have your multiple touchpoint which turns an interaction into a networking relationship. Students - especially top diverse students - are hyper-receptive to partners that invest in their growth. In a scalable corporate program, the way to invest in so many candidates' growth is to be creative with your touchpoints.
You should also tap into your allies on campus. There are career center professionals and career advisors at each university campus that have the same goal as us - engage and connect good students with good opportunities. For smaller universities and non-Ivy League schools, they are even receptive to calibration meetings where employers educate the advisors on what the companies are and are not looking for in their top student profile.”
Greg Oshode
University Relations & Branding Specialist, SHI International Corp.
“A common campus recruiting strategy that's assumed to be the most effective is to attend as many career fairs as possible. Although that may be helpful, we find that focusing on unique ways to engage with students on campus is much more impactful in recruiting efforts. Hosting pop-up events on campus – such as tabling at the student center or business school – provides the opportunity to have more organic interactions. While at events, offering interactive booths with collaborative technology increases brand recognition and drives effective conversations with students – helping SHI connect with prospective candidates even further.”
Ultimately, every campus strategy will be informed by a recruitment team’s overarching goals. But regardless of your specific strategy, much of this advice is applicable to all. Even if your target schools change or you adopt new technologies, there will always be a place for creative events, relationship management, robust preparation, and effective tracking.
Are you a university recruitment professional with advice to share? Connect with Kate, RippleMatch’s Content Editor, on LinkedIn to be considered for future articles.
