How to Create a Successful College Recruiting Program – Describe Your Target Audience (Part 4 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 fourth entry, we’ll discuss how and why it is important that you identify the critical external and internal factors that will impact your program.

Identifying and describing your target audience — why is this activity perhaps the single most important step in your college recruiting program? To answer this question, you need to think about the role a college student plays in the recruiting process. If companies consider college students their customers, the probability of recruiting success increases significantly.

Identifying and describing your target audience — why is this activity perhaps the single most important step in your college recruiting program? To answer this question, you need to think about the role a college student plays in the recruiting process. If companies consider college students their customers, the probability of recruiting success increases significantly.
In the white paper Student Recruiting Outlook 2006, author Steve Pollock suggests that
organizations who truly adopt a candidate-centric approach to recruiting fare much better in the hiring process‚ especially when the candidate is deciding among multiple offers.
Pollock advises companies as to how they might adopt a candidate-centric or customer-based approach:
Employers should strive to put themselves in the candidates‚ shoes and ensure students come away from interactions feeling wanted. It is not necessarily expensive to accomplish this, but does take careful attention to detail and process.
In the article Kickstarting Your College and MBA Recruiting Program, author Sherrie Gong Taguchi emphasizes that professionals involved in recruiting college students need to know what is important to those you want to recruit.
Specifically, she mentions the following question recruiters should answer about targeted candidates:
What matters to them now, during these particular times? (It is definitely very different than what mattered to these same candidates only a few years ago.)

• Is it your organization’s values and culture?
• Who your leaders are and your corporate responsibility?
• Are stability and measured growth more or less important?
• Is compensation at the top of the list? Or maybe career development opportunities?
• What do you have to offer that your tier-one candidates want?

Once you answer questions like these, you start to get an idea of specifics that today’s college recruits might be looking for in their first job. At the same time, your responses provide an important source of information to help direct pre-recruitment activities.
How the Customer-Based Approach Meshes With Your Requirements
This getting to know your audience activity works hand-in-hand with your company’s requirements for college recruits. Prior to beginning a new program, you will re-visit the ideal candidate for your company. The following summarizes candidate characteristics from three companies in different industries. Recruiting professionals from each company were asked, What skills/characteristics does your company look for when recruiting college students?
Acxiom Corporation’s Allison Nicholas, Team Leader‚ College Recruiting, gave this description:

• Technical skills that match the roles being filled; technical aptitude
• Well-rounded, can-do
• Excellent communication skills
• Willingness to learn

Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s Marie Artim, Assistant Vice President‚ Recruiting, gave this description:

• Leadership attributes
• Sales, customer service skills
• Motivated
• Communication skills

Red Lobster’s Heather Kreider, University Relations Manager, gave this description:

• Passion for hospitality and restaurant management
• Leadership and management skills
• Good communication skills
• Strong decision-making ability

Your company’s requirements for specific roles and the wants and needs of the students coincide to produce a profile of ideal candidates for your college recruits. Let us look at a way to identify the ideal candidates well before you develop your program.
A Sports Analogy Helps!
Sports analogies used to be frowned on, mainly because they were not generally understood. But today, most people know that colleges actively recruit young athletes and those recruitment efforts sometimes begin when the athlete is still in middle school!. After years of recruiting the same person, a college coach is very familiar with an athlete’s ability on the playing field and in the classroom.
This sports concept‚ know your audience‚ can also be employed by companies to find and recruit talented candidates early in their careers. For example, Allison Nicholas, Acxiom Corporation‚ Team Leader‚ College Recruiting, finds talent by targeting math and science contests starting at the middle-school level. Acxiom representatives network with potential recruits throughout their educational experience. According to Ms. Nicholas, What is extremely important to college recruiting at Acxiom are the relationships the company establishes with students throughout their education.