Redefining the Role of the College and University Relations Recruiter

Talk to just about any talent acquisition leader about how their organization hires students and recent graduates in 2018, and you'll find remarkable similarities in how that same organization hired similar candidates decades ago.

But that's changing.

Employers large and small have spent decades believing that hiring students and recent graduates was critical to the long-term ability of the organization to survive and thrive. They've been correct about that. But those same organizations have believed that the best way to hire those candidates was to do so on campus through career services. They've always been wrong about that, and the mistake matters today more than ever.

What's changed?

About a decade ago, employers started saying that their cost-per-hire through on-campus recruiting was about 10 times what it cost them to hire online by advertising on job boards, searching resume banks or networking through social media sites.

Finally, the conversation moved to employers’ outcomes data about two years ago, and employers learned that when they examined their top performers as related to source of hire, the students hired on campus actually performed worse than those hired online. The data shows a poor, or even inverse, correlation between the quality of the candidate’s school and how well their major aligns with the job.

This presentation’s key takeaways:

• How slow evolution of the college recruiter is impacted by employer size, type of role, schools and majors and number of jobs to fill
• Valid, invalid and corrupt reasons many organizations stick to decades-old processes
• How employers should hire students and recent graduates of all colleges and universities, and
• Why it’s important to praise employers who are effectively hiring the best and brightest candidates, based on work performance rather than pedigree