WayUp offers flexible solutions for employers to digitally source and screen for their roles—but depending on your industry, the size of your team, and your goals, on-campus recruiting might still be a necessary and valuable part of your talent acquisition strategy.
Attending career fairs and throwing on-campus events are time-tested tactics, but to ensure they’re still effective in 2020, it’s important to enhance these efforts with right technology and partnerships. Many of WayUp’s most successful partnerships are predicated on WayUp serving as a complement to a hybrid on-campus/digital recruitment strategy.
Here’s a look at how that works—and how it can increase your impact on campus. .
For many WayUp clients—from household names like Unilever, Dow Jones, and EY to under-the-radar industry leaders like Thermo Fisher Scientific, Accolade, and Apex—on-campus recruiting is an essential part of the talent acquisition strategy.
On-campus recruiting is a rare opportunity to speak directly to talent and make a personal connection. Plus, you can answer the questions of potential applicants in a low-pressure environment. For many companies, especially those less well known among college students, this can be an effective channel for building brand equity and legitimacy in the eyes of students.
Many employers visit historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) as a part of their diversity recruitment strategy and have developed great programs to reach students they may not otherwise learn about their jobs and internships.
Another big reason companies go on campus: It’s just the way they’ve always recruited. But it’s important to remember that just because it’s worked in the past, doesn’t mean it can’t be optimized.
On-Campus Recruitment Has Its Challenges
Campus events are great for generating buzz, reaching talent, and—most importantly—driving applications to your internship and entry-level programs. The problem usually isn’t candidate attraction from your campus events, it’s often the recruiting funnel post-application where there’s opportunity for improvement.
Challenge #1: By The Time You Get To The Best Applicants, They’ve Accepted Another Job
When you tour campuses for career fairs, you’re driving tons of candidates into your funnel. However, because you’re devoting so much time and bandwidth to the actual campus visitation, you end up “batching” candidates: only getting to all of the applicants you just worked so hard to acquire at the very end of your campus push.
ERE tells us that top talent is only on the market for ten days, so if you’re spending weeks on campus, waiting until you’re back into the office to organize and review them a few weeks to a month later, you’re sure to be losing top applicants.
Worst of all, this doesn’t align with the expectations of Gen Z candidates. In a recent survey, Gen Z rated timeliness as their number one priority when it comes to the application process. Responding quickly provides a better candidate experience in addition to moving top candidates deeper into your funnel ASAP.
Challenge #2: Lack Of Data Insights
It’s difficult to track the results of in-person interactions and events. While you may be able to see applicant volume from each event, it can be challenging if not impossible to collect the demographic data of everyone you speak to and you can’t be sure which applicants really came from for your efforts.
That means—even if you go to HBCUs and HSIs—it’s hard to answer questions like:
“Have these campus visits helped diversity hiring?”
“How many of our campus-sourced candidates actually pass our first-round screens?”
“Where is the drop-off occurring for candidates from our on-campus events?”.
Without data insights, you’ll be blind when it comes to doubling down on tactics that work, optimizing to close gaps, and cutting parts of your process that don’t yield any ROI.
Challenge #3: Inconsistent Candidate Experience
Having a consistent candidate experience not only increases each candidate’s engagement and preparation for interviews, it preserves your employer brand and reputation.
Consider the possible impacts of campus efforts on your candidate experience:
Campus visits allow you to connect with candidates and provide a human touch, but what about candidates who don’t get to meet you on campus? Will they know as much as candidates who got to speak to you? Do the candidates who apply digitally have a disadvantage? Regardless of how heavily you recruit on campus, some candidates are still coming from online job postings.
There can even be inconsistencies among the candidates you do meet on campus. Because of the batching issue discussed in Challenge #1, some candidates you meet on campus will get a quick reply and others will wait weeks or even months to hear back. This makes it hard for your brand and reputation to benefit from the positive experiences you provide, plus it privileges those candidates lucky enough to apply at the end of the batch.
#1: WayUp Drives Attendance To Your On-Campus Events
If you’re going on campus, then you want to make sure that great candidates are showing up to meet you.
WayUp offers a solution for your team to create a dedicated marketing campaign to drive interest and attendees to your events. Target specific candidate profiles and tap into our wide user base to drive awareness and RSVPs. These solutions are an excellent way to leverage employer branding content and custom messaging to get candidates excited about the opportunity to meet you on campus.
#2: Respond Quickly—And Decrease Your Time-To-Hire
WayUp provides a digital hub for all your campus recruiting needs. Employers can post jobs that will be shown to qualified candidates. These jobs are hosted on a WayUp company profile–a resource that also serves as a home to photos, articles, videos, and other custom content designed to promote your employer brand. In addition to these employer branding and candidate attraction solutions, WayUp offers digital screening and phone screening services.
Essentially—through our tech-enabled services—we’ll automatically review applicants for basic qualifications like willingness to relocate, work eligibility, graduation year and conduct first-round phone screens with candidates who pass this initial applicant review. Even those who don’t pass will still receive a response from your company within 24 hours.
Not only does this satisfy the two most important Gen Z candidate preferences—a quick response and a conversation with an actual human—it allows you to combat the issue of batching candidates sourced on campus. By directing candidates to apply through WayUp, you can ensure that they’ll receive a quick response and that you’ll only speak to qualified, interested applicants when you return from your campus tour.
This increase in front-end efficiency will allow you to cut your time-to-hire and get top talent through your pipeline as quickly as possible.
#3: Actionable Data Insights
With WayUp’s platform and streamlined sourcing and screening services, we’re able to rack where your candidates came from, their demographic data, and how well those candidates progressed through each stage of your recruitment funnel.
It’s important for teams to track this data in real-time to take action on it instead of waiting until it’s too late to make adjustments.
Here are a few examples of actionable insights we’ve been able to surface for our clients:
Insight: Female candidates were disproportionately failing phone screens.
Recommendation: Work with the WayUp team to develop phone screening questions that limit unconscious bias.
Insight: Candidates from underrepresented groups are passing your applicant review at a lower rate.
Recommendation: Assess which basic qualifications are actually important and consider removing ones that aren’t. For example, GPA requirements can hurt diversity.
The solutions won’t always be easy, but without these data insights, you won’t even be able to identify the problems, much less solve them.
#4: Provide A Consistent And Positive Candidate Experience
Partnering with WayUp allows you to provide every candidate with a quick response. Your team will be eliminating the dreaded applicant black hole—resumes, cover letters, and hard work go in; nothing comes out. By responding to every application, you’ll automatically have a better candidate experience than most companies.
But, of course, the candidate experience continues after applicant review, and partnering with WayUp can help you improve yours throughout the interview process.
For partners who take advantage of our phone screening services, every candidate gets to speak to a real human and receive personalized feedback within 24 hours. This prepares each applicant for the next step in your interview process—and candidates love the personal touch. In fact, 87 percent of Gen Z jobseekers would prefer to speak to a human during the interview process instead of doing a pre-recorded video interview.
#5: Reach Candidates You’d Never Meet On Campus
As effective as on-campus events can be, some roles will always be hard to fill. If you need Public Health majors in the Milwaukee area or Material Sciences students in Newark, you won’t always be able to drive enough qualified candidates to apply just by visiting campus.
WayUp has more than 5 million users representing over 7,000 schools across the United States. We’ll work with you to understand your ideal candidate profile and source top talent accordingly. Our team will also conduct first-round phone screens to ensure all candidates we deliver are qualified and prepared.
In the modern early-career recruiting landscape, relying on one approach won't keep you competitive. Instead, it’s important to consider which channels support your hiring goals—and to find ways to optimize them, and look for solutions to solve your most pressing problems.
WayUp’s flexible solutions allow you to take your on-campus recruiting to the next level by complementing your strengths and filling in the gaps.
Have questions? Email us at engage@wayup.com or fill out the form below to talk to our sales team.
