How to Create a Successful College Recruiting Program – Target Schools (Part 5 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 fifth entry, we’ll discuss how and why it is important that you identify the schools at which you’ll focus your on-campus recruiting efforts.

Based on the results of the previous three steps and any other information from alumni and college faculty/administration contacts gathered throughout the previous year, you may need to find or re-look at which schools to target for your program.

Factors that could cause you to add a school to your program are as follows:

• Strong recommendations from employees who are alumni.
• The addition of a program from which you can draw candidates.
• A change in administration at a school where you wanted to recruit students, but were not able to gain a foothold.

Factors that might cause you to cross a school off your list:

• Budget limitations
• Change in the quality of a program you were recruiting from.
• Recruits from a particular school/program are no longer a good fit with your corporate culture.
• Poor results from a previous year(s). This could possibly result from other issues.

New college recruiting programs may have a difficult time establishing relationships in certain schools. You might want to turn to some of your existing employees who have established relationships with administrators and faculty at their alma maters. In addition, find and build relationships with the career service office professionals and other college administrators who head the departments which control on-campus recruiting. Small, local colleges may be an excellent place to start. Your successful relationships with these schools will allow you to more easily enter the front-door to the schools that have a large number of employers trying to hire their students.