Modernizing Campus Recruiting – Insights From Top TA Leaders

To recruit millennials, you must lean heavily on early adoption of technology. Not only will new technologies make recruiting departments more efficient, but company representatives need to understand the technologies used by the generation/s they are trying to recruit. What does this mean for how we hire from universities? What practices should universities eliminate? What practices should employers adopt? How can campus recruiters modernize their practices?

Carolyn Betts @BettsCEO**

CEO, Betts Recruiting 

Universities should have an online platform for companies looking to hire on campus and have students able to apply to jobs prior to the company’s arrival on campus. Then, when the company comes, they can meet a volume of students who are already interested in working there. It’s also more productive for companies to host custom events to speak directly to their audience and meet people as a first round interview without all the noise and irrelevant students.

Melissa (Hartigan) Fairman, SPHR (@HrRemix)

Senior Manager Human Resources at Mickey Thompson Performance Racing

I hate the term “millennial” because it represents a caricature (whiny, entitled, can’t-put-their-phone down, etc), which could describe any individual in a particular “generation.” Public and private employers have limited resources, rather than spend resources trying to figure out how to target millennials on the social media platform of the moment, they should focus on the experience of applying for a job. This isn’t something that just “old” people care about. No one, of any age, wants to spend 45 minutes applying for a job. Figure out a way for people to apply quickly, then work on marketing.

Lumen Sivitz (@Lumen)

Head of Talent Strategy at Quantcast (former CEO MightySpring & Head of Recrutiing @ Shyp)

Don’t limit your company to just career fairs. Instead of diving into the heat of competition for student attention at university-sponsored career events, look to monopolize the attention of your specific target audience by sponsoring events and co-hosting on-campus meetups that will interest students who share your company’s core values. 

Jorgen Sundberg (@jorgensundberg)

CEO at LinkHumans

Expect to be checked out everywhere online, not just LinkedIn. Employee review sites like Glassdoor will reveal the true nature of what it’s like on the inside of an organisation, along with open social networks such as Twitter. So be transparent and encourage your people to post about their employee experience on various platforms.

Cassie Stover (read more about Cassie’s Campus recruiting expertise)

University Relations Specialist at Delphix

We have a lot of success recruiting from universities where our employees get to go back to their alma mater. For example, when we return to campus recruiting events at Brown with Delphix Brown alumni, we always drive a lot of interest and generally hire a strong cohort of top students. As we expand the number of campus recruiting events we attend, and enter new regions where we have little brand recognition or alumni presence, the success of the event is as much about growing out long-term talent pipeline as it is about making a hire today.

There you have it – these talent acquisition leaders span across large recruitment firms, large tech companies, and high priced consultants – and they are advising you to check candidates out in emerging online platforms, adopt a recruiting technology, reduce friction to apply, source from meetups, improve your online employer branding and source from alumni networks. Until next time, happy hiring.

With Rakuna – an online one-stop shop platform, recruiting millennials will be at ease without all the guesswork and manual tasks. Along with our new product Interview Management, following-up with candidates for creating long-term relationships cannot be anymore easier than this. Save your time and effort seeking for talents now.