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4 Campus Recruitment Strategies that Work

Date: 12/06/2018 | Posted by: MeritTrac | Category: Campus Recruitment , Corporate

Hiring campus talent, especially millennials, is a jigsaw puzzle that HR leaders are constantly trying to decode. On one hand, there is a section of potential hires who are choosing startups over renowned brands and on the other, there are many who prefer to begin their careers with well-established companies. By providing assistance in repaying student loans to offering smartphone discounts and protection against identity theft, companies are trying out new ways of capturing the imagination of these inscrutable minds as they hit the campuses.

Even as global players like Amazon step up their recruitment plans by 25%, finding the right talent deployable in ongoing projects remains a challenge in India. Many companies are therefore resorting to ‘specialised recruiting’ for candidates with niche skills. Companies like Infosys and Wipro, whose standard package has been – Rs.3.4 to Rs.3.5 lakh, are now ready to offer up to Rs.10 lakh or even Rs.17 lakh to candidates with skills in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science and robotics among others.

But, in spite of being an excellent platform for finding talented candidates, campus hiring also sees low job acceptance rates and no shows after accepting a job offer. This is caused by labour-intensive recruitment methods and slow offer processing methods that lead to students accepting one job over another.

How to do Campus Recruitment?

Campus recruitment is a tried and tested method for hiring talented entry-level candidates. In India, recruiters representing top companies and startups visit colleges to identify and connect with students with talents, skills, and good employability quotient. Today, the key to success with campus hiring lies in mapping the right campuses, engaging with skilled candidates, and speeding up the hiring funnel. There are various campus recruitment strategies that can help you achieve these specific hiring objectives.

Campus Recruitment Strategies

The number of corporate organizations that visit colleges for recruitment drives has increased over the years and recruiters now face the challenge of hiring freshers amidst tough competition. As attracting the right talent gets extremely difficult, here are a few campus recruitment strategies that recruiters can deploy to make an impactful campus hiring plan.

#1 Customise to make your campus pitch compelling

Given the array of choices available, different levers drive career aspirations of the current generation. While some look at joining a company as a launch pad to further their entrepreneurial dreams, others may look for a faster vertical growth. Therefore, it is important that HR leaders carefully craft their campus pitch such that it resonates with different types of audience. Siemens, in its effort to move away from its image of being a large, traditional company, has created ‘people at work’ documentaries as part of its campus recruitment plan to showcase its ‘cooler’ side.

#2 Strengthen your social media connect

It is said, social media is where the ‘Gen Z’ lives. Any brand trying to increase its visibility in this group must have a strong presence in social media. Industry reports say 36.17% of talent hunt happens through social media recruitment. Launching campaigns with messages that have a youthful tone will help. Harley Davidson’s #FindYourFreedom is the apt case in point here. It is the motorbike major’s 12-week internship program targeted towards millennials looking at marketing communication as a career.

#3 Strengthen connect with students and alumni clubs

For employers, student organizations are a great way to engage and create possible buy-in for a brand. Targeting groups focused on in-campus networking can help to keep campuses abuzz with what’s happening in a particular brand. Campus alumnus can be great brand ambassadors. Organising talks, where alumni share their experiences, can go a long way in influencing the decisions of prospective hires. Mercedes Benz encourages its people to invite students from their respective colleges for a tour of its engineering bases.

#4 Focus on developing relationships

Organizing recruitment drives once a year is a very ad hoc approach to achieving the long-term goal of assessing high potential talent. The focus should be on building a continuous evaluation framework to step up a student’s readiness for the industry. Forging the long-term partnership with academic units such as the Training & Placement Office (TPO) is a good step to introduce industry relevant training in colleges. TPOs can be a good channel to drive employability through regular assessment by sharing feedback on strengths and improvement areas of students. This not only creates a pool of job-ready talent but also simplifies campus recruitment processes and saves the cost involved in orienting the campus hires.

Salaries and brand names are no longer the only levers to attract millennials who are individualists looking for brands that value who they are and keep them excited with the ground-breaking work they do. It’s clear that campus recruitment strategies must go beyond transactional engagement to build a strong and sustained connect with students, and establish a ready recall among potential hires.

Conclusion

Traditional hiring methods are not suited for campus recruitment, which sees a mass turnover of applicants. You can get quick and improved results by adapting online assessment tools in your campus recruitment plan. These modern tools can speed up the testing and result processing time without compromising on the quality of the assessment process. MeritTrac's assessment suites feature aptitude tests, domain skills test, behavioral traits test, and cognitive ability test that are specially curated to determine the employability quotient of graduates. Club these assessments with a well-structured campus hiring strategy to find entry-level candidates with the right fit and right intent.

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