Why did my high school baseball team buy Under Armour long sleeve shirts? Simple, the shirts made us feel like all star sluggers. But I would argue that the most attractive part of Under Armour isn’t their shirt technology, branding strategies, football cleats, or super bowl commercials – it’s their people.

Honestly, Under Armour has the most ideal internship program I have come across; their company understands the value of engaging college students. I had the opportunity for some Q&A with Under Armour’s college recruiting leader, Christina Visaggio.

Here is what Christina had to say:

I sat down last week with Stephanie Polon, who has been recently promoted to national director of campus recruiting for BDO Seidman, to discuss how this recruiting season was different from years past. BDO Seidman is the fifth-largest international accounting firm and, as you can imagine, places a strong focus on college recruiting. Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Stacey B. Randall: You have been a college recruiter for four years. How was the 2009 recruiting season different from previous years?

Stephanie Polon: From the students’ perspective, it is more competitive and students are accepting more interviews in hopes of increasing their chances to land a job. The students are also more nervous, understandably so, and it is making them open to different opportunities. For example, a finance major may consider changing gears to accounting to widen their net for landing a job as we are still hiring.

I recently had the unique pleasure of interviewing Red McCombs. If the name sounds familiar, it should. He is the founder of the Red McCombs Automotive Group (6th largest auto conglomerate in the US), a co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, a former owner of the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, and the Minnesota Vikings, and the namesake of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin (through a donation of $50 Million). Still not ringing a bell? He was also named one of Forbes magazine’s top 400 richest Americans in 2005.

A very down-to-earth and humble Texan, Mr. McCombs shared an hour with me in an effort to consolidate decades of experience into some simple career advice that we can all benefit from. Much of the discussion centered on a few key factors that he attributes to his great success. The first of which is related to Career Vision. I’ve always thought that it is essential to have a good idea of where you want to go in your career. If it’s mapped, getting there should be considerably easier. To Mr. McCombs, it’s much more important to put your skills in motion.

Don’t visualize it, just do it. With a true entrepreneurial spirit, Mr. McCombs sought roles that he had an interest in. It wasn’t necessary to be an expert in it. He considers life and work to be learning activities. The more you do, the more you learn. The important key is to get into the action. “When something new comes along that you like, try it on,” McCombs stated. Put your spin on it and see what happens. He doesn’t believe in the ideal moment to become engaged. Waiting on it just wastes your time.

I saw a presentation given by Tina Krater from Shaker Recruitment Advertising speaking about the benefits of running virtual career fairs.  I’ve seen dozens of presentations on the benefits of virtual career fairs for a decade, and before I had a chance to zone out, Tina showed a few screen shots.  Wow!

Allstate ran their college virtual career fair on October 21st from 9am-5pm CST.  The live fair targeted students at 50 campuses, but ended up receiving candidates from 150 universities.  The fair was designed to help build Allstate’s brand on campus, and to help increase applications this fall.

I spoke to Bruce Williams, the Director of Talent Acquisition at Allstate, at the  onrecExpo, and he seemed  pleased so far.  “One of the big issues we face with recruiting college students is the stereotype that all we recruit are insurance sales positions.  An event like this with different booths allowed us to show the different sides of Allstate where we could display marketing, accounting, and actuarial positions.”

We received a story idea from Jaye Girouard, longtime intern-co-op/college consultant at Digital Equipment Corp; Compaq; and recently Intel.  She received a call from a former student of hers, now a professor at prestigious Brown University, saying that many students there had just given up when it came to searching for jobs.  The professor had polled peers at other top institutions only to find that this mindset was not unique to Brown, but was at many other colleges as well.

Jaye visited Brown recently to speak with students and help motivate them and found several common themes amongst the population:

• Millenials have not endured hard times in the market place which puts them at a disadvantage
• Students didn’t see the point of going to career fairs since companies didn’t seem to be hiring
• Students thought that there was too much competition for jobs right now, so they would try later
• Many students planned to take the summer off, and then try to look for jobs in the fall
• Some students believed that they had no relevant experience that could be placed on resumes