Your team’s going on campus, and that’s great! College campuses are an exciting place to meet enthusiastic top early-career talent.
You’re spending a lot of money by doing it, though. And like any prudent person, you ask yourself, “Is the money well spent?” To answer this, you need to understand the efficacy of your team’s on-campus recruiting efforts.
So how are you measuring your team’s effectiveness? What are you doing to incentivize them to improve and drive efficiency? Focus on these five metrics and you’ll understand their performance.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), companies that recruit on campus have an average cost-per-hire of $6,275. That’s three times higher than companies that don’t recruit on campus. (They spend an average of $2,027.)
To attract and engage top candidates, you’ll need to evaluate which institutions are actually driving qualified candidates for your team. From there you can determine where, when, and how to allocate that funding.
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Part of the problem with on-campus recruitment is the developing arms race. Companies are competing for top talent, and this has caused their time-to-hire to continually increase, as they’ve increasingly recruited earlier and earlier.
Currently, the average time-to-hire from job posting to offer is 62 days. This number can, unfortunately, continue to climb if the on-campus recruitment arms race intensifies.
You and your recruiters need to measure your team’s time-to-hire to see how it stacks up against the average time-to-hire. This will reveal a lot about your team’s on-campus hiring efficiency.
Your team’s conversion rate of on-campus candidates is a great performance indicator that both you and your recruiters need to monitor. If your team is visiting campuses that drive a lot of applicants but not qualified candidates, then it’s time to consider going to different schools. Institutions that don’t drive top talent shouldn’t be part of your core schools.
According to Gallup, only 32 percent of US employees are engaged at their job. That’s scary. Even scarier: What if your early-career hires are among those unengaged employees? People starting their careers are buoyed by enthusiasm and drive. If that excitement has alreadydissipated from your company’s early-career employees, then there may be a systemic problem with your company culture.
Your company’s culture may be causing workers to actively become disengaged. According to the Harvard Business Review, disengaged workers cause organizations to be 18 percent less productive and 16 percent less profitable and have 37 percent lower job growth and 65 percent lower share price over time.
It also matters if you want to take a reverse engineering approach to on-campus recruitment. If, for instance, your team is hiring early-career employees that quickly become disengaged workers, then the problem is two-fold: Your team needs to rethink the talent they’re targeting on campus. The second aspect is, again, evaluating if that school should remain a core institution.
Here’s another great way to evaluate your team’s on-campus efforts: on-campus ROI. This allows you to see if your on-campus recruitment strategy is producing desired results. You can do this by using the following formula:
Amount of Money + Time Invested
Now measure that number against the following:
Number of Qualified Candidates/Number of Hires
Take this number and compare it to your team’s target cost-per-hire. How does it measure up against what you hoped your cost-per-hire would be? The answer helps you see if you have an efficient early-career recruitment strategy.
If you and your recruiters measure and analyze these five metrics, your company’s on-campus recruiting will be more effective.
