How to Create a Successful College Recruiting Program – Assess Your Past Performance (Part 3 of 14)

The purpose of this series of CollegeRecruiter.com Blog entries is to define and describe the basic steps to create a successful college recruiting program. In the first entry, we defined success and laid out the steps to the program. In this third entry, we’ll discuss how and why it is important that you assess the past performance of your program.

College recruiting program managers may want to steal a tip from Information Technology project managers. After a major application system deployment, a project manager should conduct a Lessons Learned session to discuss what went right with the project and what could have been done more intelligently. No project or program will run without activities that could be accomplished more efficiently or by producing more effective results.

So what was done in prior years to college recruiting programs that could be tweaked? Or, if you are starting a new program, you may want to ask colleagues in other companies what they could improve to run a better program. Either way, a good start is to learn from other companies mistakes. A list of well thought out Lessons Learned tips can be seen in the article Ten Cost-Effective Tips to Improve Your Campus Recruiting by Steve Pollock of WetFeet:

What else from past programs should be assessed? Here is a list of a more items you could consider:

1. Did your company meet anticipated needs for college hires in previous years? If not, why not? What were the roadblocks to achieving these needs? What could you do differently for this year’s program?
2. Has the recruiting staff changed since the last program was completed? Is supplemental training required to accommodate this year’s program?
3. What was the cost per hire for the previous program? How does that compare to other companies in your industry or in other industries?
4. A commonly-used human resources tool is evaluations, especially in training. If your company asked for feedback during any phase of the college recruiting process, you can use the insights of college students as part of your assessment.
5. A valuable follow-up item for assessing your past performance is interviewing. Talk to college recruits from the last few programs and to alumni who have relationships with instructors, administrators, and students from various schools.
6. What is the turnover rate for college hires in the past few years? If these rates have been higher than anticipated, it may benefit the college recruiting program to review exit interviews of a sample of the college hires who are no longer employed by your company.