To close the curtains every fall and spring semester, universities find a sweet spot with campus recruiting events. College students in their final years buzz with the palpable excitement of lucrative job offers, making a sure footing into promising futures. It all centers around campus recruiting drives– the aspirations of the students and their determinants of success in their respective careers.
Campus recruiting events are a win-win for both large-scale industries and startups as they get a firsthand pick of the youngest brains in an enormous talent pool. Gen-Z employees are a crucial 12.6% of the workforce today. Fast forward to 2025, millennials will make up 75% of the workforce.
So, be it an entry-level niche position or a mass hiring drive, there is an unputdownable probability of your best bet being a wide-eyed, quick-to-learn fresher straight out of a classroom.
Role of a Campus Recruiter
The shoes of a campus recruiter are not easy to fill. The role extends beyond the rewarding feeling of offering golden opportunities to passionate and ambitious youngsters.
Taking charge of campus recruiting requires a mix of hard and soft skills. However, the exact responsibilities depend on the scope of the role at hand. Usually, a recruiter is required to:
Build credibility with institutions
Establish and maintain strong connections with colleges and universities, and other educational institutions to identify and engage with potential candidates. Ideally, a recruiter would be building a database of these candidates and touch base with them regularly to keep abreast of their growing interests.
Strategize campus recruitment events
Organize, attend, and represent the company at job fairs, career days, and other campus recruitment events to attract and engage with prospective employees. However, participating in campus recruitment is more than just showing up at events or aligning them to university recruitment strategies.
Campus recruiters would need to meticulously plan these events and pull as much crowd as they can. Drawing more footfall would mean an increased chance of hiring the best talents and this is one of the prime responsibilities of a campus recruiter.
Screen and interview candidates
During and after conducting campus information sessions, you have to go through an array of resumes and file them. Now this would require a hawk-eye review of each candidate to ensure that they are retaining the best of the lot for further rounds without any bias in the interview process.
This might seem like an easy task but is more complex as companies don’t just look for someone who meets the necessary educational qualifications for a role.
With 87% of recruiting wizards experiencing the TA process growing more strategic with time, you realize that this is because companies are also looking to match the cultural fit of the workspace and this is where campus recruiting expertise comes in handy.
Coordinate the recruitment process
Right from managing the logistics of recruitment events, including scheduling interviews to arranging travel for candidates, a campus recruiter dons several hats. Almost 78% of candidates report that the overall hiring experience holds a mirror to how the company values its employees.
Naturally, the onus falls on the campus recruiter in this case to hold up the employer brand and build positive connections with the interviewees. This not only ensures prompt referrals, but also lets you build strong connections with probable hires for future vacancies.
Tips to Prepare for Campus Recruiting
A smart recruiter gauges their target before stepping onto the college campus. Keep in mind that it is not just the applicants who need to come prepared, but you too. Because recruiter and candidate expectations are both ways. To help you kickstart your campus recruiting journey, here are a few tips that could prove useful:
1. Build a campus recruiting team
Delegating tasks can actually take the burden from your shoulders and equally distribute them among your team members. Plus, their perspectives and opinions when it comes to filtering candidates in the hiring process is always an added bonus.
2. Lead with a youth-friendly presence
Sadly, 78% of employees report an absence of diversity in leadership positions. This directly affects their motivation and honestly, in 2024, is a sham to the company’s workplace culture.
Make sure that the team you build has a fair share of youth presence on it. This helps make your company look presentable and approachable and creates a strong brand image that the students on campus would be able to relate to.
3. Invest in brochures and kits
To keep candidates hooked even after the interview process, a good idea could be to offer them your company brochure and a little “thank you” kit. This not only helps boost morals but also gives the students a fair idea about what it would be like to work in a professional setting.
It gives them the time to get to know the company in detail, and loop back in with you should they have any questions. Should you feel the need to take the correspondence ahead, you can even host employer information sessions and other events to further help the candidates with a better idea of your workplace. This fosters a chain of communication with genuine candidates weeding out the loose fits.
4. Say yes to recruitment softwares and social media
As AI continues to take over the world, hiring has actually been made easy with recruitment software. When it comes to college hiring, it is a smart decision to invest in these Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to file all the applications meticulously.
It doesn’t come as a shocker that the chronically online youth in 2024 is changing the world one click at a time. Companies across the globe have harvested this gold mine with an impressive 98% of hiring teams actively using social media, to boost both recruiting and employer branding. So, what are you waiting for?
5. Virtual interviews work just fine
While you’re researching technological blips that can make your work easy, why not give virtual interviews a shot? With the rise of remote working and digital platforms, virtual career fairs have become a staple in the job search market, especially since the pandemic.
Use these platforms to reach a wider audience without the limitations of physical presence. Especially if you’re hiring for both remote and Work From Office (WFO) roles, you can schedule virtual interviews with the applicants for the remote position.
This cuts down on traveling and other miscellaneous expenditures on your end, while making sure that you can effectively allocate your resources based on your priority.
Use These Campus Recruiting Strategies to Hire Top Talents
Once you approach campus recruiting strategically, there is no going back. Having a clear roadmap to your goals not only helps you visualize the optimal outcome but also switches things up along the way in case there is a call for Plan B.
Build a strong campus presence
Creating a robust campus presence is crucial for attracting top talent. Start by establishing relationships with key universities and colleges long before the recruiting season begins. Participate in career fairs, host informational sessions, and engage in campus events to increase visibility.
You can take this a step further if you encourage alumni who are now employees to participate in these events. They can provide students with relatable success stories and insights into your organization, creating a very relatable roadmap to handhold the young minds.
Research before you offer
To attract top talent, it's important to offer competitive compensation and benefits packages. Research industry standards and ensure your salary offerings are attractive to new graduates based on the role you are hiring for.
As you do this, highlight additional benefits that set your company apart, such as health and wellness programs, flexible working hours, and opportunities for professional development. This might let you attract a good talent pool who look for long-term benefits and association as compared to the applicants who have turned up for the instant gratification of a lump sum in hand.
A positive candidate experience goes a long way
Creating a good rapport with the applicants is key to successful campus recruiting. Maintain clear and consistent communication with candidates throughout the campus interviews to build trust and keep them engaged. Ensure your hiring process is efficient and streamlined to avoid unnecessary delays that might discourage candidates. Providing timely feedback and regular follow-ups can show that you value their time and effort in a world where 4 in every 5 candidates reported not being asked for their feedback.
Additionally, if resources allow, consider offering personalized experiences, such as on-site visits or virtual tours of your workplace, to give applicants a better understanding of your company culture. This can leave a lasting impression and catalyze the top talent into accepting your job offers.
Provide real-world experience
In the age of rapid digitization, students lack the hands-on experience of professionalism. Offering filtered applicants real-world experience through internships and project-based recruitment as opposed to an immediate full-time role can be highly effective in attracting top talent.
Internships and project-based recruitment methods will provide them with the opportunity to apply their skills in a practical setting, giving them a taste of what it's like to work at your company. This can help them determine if they are a good fit for your organization and vice versa.
Streamline hiring with data-driven recruitment
Using data-driven recruitment strategies can significantly enhance your campus recruiting efforts. By leveraging data analytics, you can track and analyze the effectiveness of your recruitment campaigns, identify trends with the applicants and competitors both, and make informed decisions to improve your approach.
Another tech-wiz that you can take the help of is candidate assessment tools. They help evaluate skills and potential accurately, ensuring you select the best fit for your company.
Once you incorporate these insights into your hiring loop, it can also help you understand which campuses yield the best talent, allowing you to focus your efforts more strategically. Continuously reviewing and refining your recruitment strategies based on data can lead to better outcomes and a stronger talent pipeline.
Use Skima for Efficient Campus Recruiting
With multiple interviews to take and tens, if not, hundreds of resumes and candidate profiles to juggle, the challenges of campus recruiting can hinder your decision-making capabilities and advent in biased or poor hires. Here are two ways Skima AI makes your campus recruiting process seamless;
Detailed Job Descriptions: With Skima’s job description maker, you can create insightful, engaging, and tailored JDs for varied job roles. Our LLM models understand industry needs and your business goals and suggest detailed prompts that you can employ to tailor your job descriptions to the tee.
- Seamless Resume Screening: Our resume screening technology is based on advanced AI and Machine Learning models that are trained on hundreds of data points. To discover quality candidates perfect for a job role, all you need to do is update the candidate database and job description on to Skima. The platform screens each candidate against the JD to list the best fits via AI Matching Score.
End Note
Effective campus recruiting requires a combination of early engagement, strategic use of technology, a compelling employer brand, and a tailored approach to each university. By implementing these strategies, you can attract top talent and build a strong pipeline of future leaders for your organization.
Campus recruiting is not just about filling positions but also about establishing a long-term relationship with educational institutions and their students. Investing time and resources into campus recruiting can yield significant returns for your company, ensuring you hire the best and brightest minds to drive your business forward.
