On-campus recruiting is a tradition that supports young graduates in continuing their education in the workforce while providing corporations with eager workers ready and willing to learn. But how you approach your on-campus recruitment matters even more in a talent competitive market.
Here are 3 employer-driven ideas to engage in on-campus diversity recruiting efforts.
1. Sponsor a Recruitment Event
Today, it’s second nature for students to apply for jobs online. Keep in mind most students are new to engaging with employers. Sponsoring an on-campus event to encourage interaction, partnership, and competition among students is a fantastic way to keep your company’s name at the forefront of student discussions. These 10 Outstanding Recruiting Event Examples provide proven ideas of how to rally large diverse audiences around a common cause: employment, internships, and cash prizes.
While the most common image of a recruiting event is a career fair, this article shares that “companies are finding experiential marketing methods to find top talent while offering more to a candidate than just a pamphlet.”
Some innovative recruitment marketing strategies include hackathons, conferences, competitions, and career fairs to name but a few.
Sponsoring a recruitment event, such as a hackathon or a competition, allows you to see students for what they can do. It allows you to thoroughly assess and find the best candidate to meet your needs while sourcing from the entire student body population.
By hosting an on-campus recruiting event, you open your doors wide to all students and narrow your selection based on the rules and requirements of the event, allowing creativity, efficacy, and the speed of their solutions (to name but a few potential criteria) to govern your selection.
2. Advertise Internships Through On-Campus Organizations
While events create buzz, an equally effective way to build short and long-term value in your diversity efforts are opportunities for paid internships. For college students, paid internships are hot commodities because they want real work experience and need to get paid.
So, advertise your paid internships through on-campus organizations and don’t forget to include the Multi-cultural and International Student Organizations, increasing your diversity sourcing and guaranteeing equal opportunity for all engaged students.
Short-term, you’ll create relationships with great students and long-term, you’ll be seen as a partner within key colleges and universities, granting you a reputation for valuing top talent, diversity, and innovation not only in your workspaces but also in the mindsets of the students you chose to mentor.
3. Host Diversity & Inclusion Dialogues On-Campus and On Social Media
It’s no secret, especially on university campuses, that diverse teams deliver superior results.
“Deloitte’s most recent Human Capital Trends report found that companies with inclusive talent practices can generate up to 30% higher revenue per employee and greater profitability than their competitors.”
Those findings are powerful in print but imagine the impact dialogue with college students would have, discussing steps, approaches, and resources they can leverage now and in their not-so-distant professional lives to promote diversity within their workplaces, on their teams, and in their networks. Also, how to professionally manage situations that distinctly lack diversity in both representation and mindset.
At the end of the day, to make a short or long-term impact on your diversity efforts, it’s not only about having the “right” mix of diverse people in your organization. There is no magic formula that gives organizations the results Deloitte studies say are possible with diverse teams.
The goal is empathy. As employees and future employees, we have to build our cultural empathy muscles so that we can start not only respecting the differences in other people’s values, traditions, and beliefs but understanding them. It’s only once we understand where and why another believes as they do that we can value the insights they bring to the table.
By hosting a dialogue similar to this on a college campus, a company not only shows it values diversity—true diversity in both representation and thought—but also that it values the thoughts, opinions, and perspectives of the students who choose to participate.
As recruiters, if we’re truly playing the long-game with on-campus recruiting, events and opportunities like the three mentioned above will go a long way to helping build short and long-term value in your diversity recruiting efforts.
There are only two caveats. First, these have to be a campus-wide opportunity. And second, if prizes are awarded, they must be irresistible to any and all students.
This does three things:
- It puts your company at the forefront of campus discussions
- You create relationships with every student body club, group, greek, geek, and introvert on campus, helping you win the diversity sourcing game.
- Allows you to find the very best candidates for your organization, with little to no guesswork from you.
And at the end of the day, you become a partner with the school to help motivate, inspire, and support the student population, that alone will provide long-term value to your diversity and recruitment efforts for years to come.