Why should I use a job board to recruit students and recent graduates?

A potential customer of College Recruiter just asked a great question of our sales team. We’re trying to convince them to advertise their internships on our job search site as we know from experience that we will deliver an excellent return on investment to them. Quite simply, their profile is a perfect fit: Fortune 1,000 employer with thousands of employees and they hire hundreds of students and recent graduates a year.

So, what’s the problem? As a good, potential customer does, they communicated their key concern or, as a salesperson would call it, objection. The customer, through their advertising agency, said that they don’t advertise their internship roles because they hire all of them through on-campus, career fairs. Our response:

Would it make sense to have a joint call with the customer who facilitates large scale intern recruitment campaigns to talk with them about how they can supplement those efforts, reduce their time to hire, reduce their cost per hire, and reduce the turnover and therefore productivity of the hires by diversifying their sourcing efforts to be more inclusive of students who attend schools that the employer would like to recruit at but for which they don’t have the resources?

There’s now a ton of data that prove that the more diverse a workforce, the more productive that workplace is. Going to the same schools and recruiting the same kinds of students year after year — the minority who attend campus career fairs — creates a hiring pipeline that is not diverse, even if the skin color or gender of some of those candidates check the “diversity” boxes because you’re not tapping into students who couldn’t get into those schools yet greatly improved their academic performance while in school or students whose family financials prevented them from even applying or accepting an offer to attend those schools.

We’ve written about this extensively and I’m happy to share links with you if you’d like but the reality is that a rapidly increasing minority of employers who hire students and recent graduates at scale, as this customer appears to be doing, are becoming more and more school and even major agnostic because they’re looking at their outcomes data — how productive the employees are in the workplace — and finding a low and sometimes even a negative correlation between the perceived quality of the school or alignment of the major to the work and the workplace performance of the employee. Some of these employers, including Goldman Sachs for undergrads, have stopped hiring on-campus. Others, like Amazon, never started and are committed to not going down that path. Most, like Lockheed Martin, are shifting resources away from on-campus and toward what they call “virtual” college recruitment. I see this as a huge opportunity for College Recruiter, of course, but also for our [advertising agency] partners.