How to Create a Successful College Recruiting Program – Execute Your Program (Part 11 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 eleventh entry, we’ll discuss how to execute your program.

Hopefully, regardless of whether you are starting a program or are a seasoned college recruiter, you have considered all the major factors impacting your program and carefully planned out the activities. New programs should be executed under the leadership of experienced managers; otherwise, as with most complex projects, inexperience will create mistakes and lengthen the time to achieve success.

Best practices for college recruiting programs were presented throughout this publication by giving examples and illustrations from the pros. On the other side of the “best practice” scenario, there are program execution mistakes to be avoided in program execution. In the article Kickstarting Your College and MBA Recruiting Program, Sherrie Gong Taguchi, an experienced college recruiting practitioner and author on this topic, presents

a synthesis of the worst mistakes from working with hundreds of organizations and recruiters over the years:

• Recruiting college graduates and MBAs like your other recruits; not differentiating your plan.
• Decentralizing too much among human resources, recruiting teams, and the hiring managers.
• Not playing by the rules of the schools.
• Expecting too much in the beginning as you are building your program.
• Turning the recruiting faucet on and off.
• Failing to market the program internally.
• Exhibiting complacency and arrogance.

Remember that college recruiting is strategic. If your organization is not hiring this year, you still need to go on-campus to meet with the staff and faculty. Be open and honest with them. They understand that businesses face hiring cycles. When it is time for you to turn on the faucet again, you will find strong advocates waiting for you.