I finished reading an article written for NACE’s Spotlight titled, “Effective Career Fair Recruiting: How to Increase Your ROI.” Let’s just say this latest article had some good points as usual, but unfortunately this time really left me shaking my head. First, I don’t think the title has anything to do with ROI. ROI is return on investment. The return is about hiring the best possible interns and soon-to-be grads that fit your organization’s profile and having them stay and spend many years there. The investment is about the amount of money spent at that campus, and your team’s time to pull off the event. There are several areas of this article where I disagree, and I will make other suggestions that should allow better ROI.

The article with this preface, “The following, based on observations gathered over several years, is intended to increase recruiter effectiveness at career fairs and therefore increase the organization’s ROI.” This statement at best is a reach. For instance, the article states that one of the ways to increase ROI is to spend money advertising including through student newspapers, flyers on and off campus, information tables on campus, student radio stations, and working with career centers to have class announcements in specific areas.

I’ve always liked the class announcements aspect as the only investment on your side is time and effort. If you have a good management system, you should be able to send out faculty e-newsletters quarterly. The rest of the ideas here, I believe are archaic and will actually decrease your ROI for many organizations. Mass advertising costs money and is not targeted. Most organizations go to career fairs looking for specific people. It might be engineers, accountants, consultants, managers… whatever it is, very few companies just hire in mass. Student newspaper advertising is not cheap as a full page display ad in the Lantern for Ohio State is almost $2,000, which is roughly 4x more expensive than registering to attend the fair! Flyers on and off campus I believe promote that your organization is wasting paper and not eco-friendly. As for student radio stations, unless you are trying to attract the DJs, only a few schools have students listening to student radio. This also seems like a waste of money.

With 2.2 million students in UK Higher Education alone, and with so many graduates with strong A levels and getting a 2.1 (see my last blog) it is crucial to find ways to effectively target the right talent on campus. What can the Universities themselves offer to help you recruit your interns & graduates?

Firstly, which Universities to target? If you know the courses you want to target use www.unistats.ac.uk to find the Universities who run those specific courses.

Also think about the type of individuals you want to hire – for example, do you need more practically / vocationally biased in which case you may want to target the newer Universities. The other factor in who to target should be how easy the University make it for you to work with them – in other words good, old fashioned customer focus. So don’t just automatically think target the Top 10 Universities.

When asked where they prefer to work, many students might respond: “Google.” Google receives a resume every 8.2 seconds (and that stat was prior to the unemployment crises). This isn’t magic….Google just cares about talent quite a bit more more than your average company. Everyone boasts that what makes their business/company stand out from others is “the people.” Companies can talk the talk, but few walk the walk. And, the companies (like Google) that walk the walk succeed simply because the top talent desire to work there. Google isn’t magical, they just “get it.” Google knows that talent means everything and they allocate resources (money, time, creativity) to the recruiting process.

“One top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average… Google would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist.”- Alan Eustace, VP of Engineering at Google.

So, how does Google “get it?” They engage students early and create an enticing place to work. They don’t get the most amazing people magically. They get them because they are committed. How?

I wrote a post back in February about search engine optimization for university recruiters.  With the recruiting season starting now, I was curious to see who made headway in this area. I did some Google and Bing searches to see where companies lie when it comes to search results on university recruiting. Here are some of the tests we ran:

Ad Agencies continue to pioneer the business-within-a-business internship model. It produces results. Students love it. Ad Agencies love it.

How does it work? An ad agency hires a team of interns, let’s say five. They have these five interns work as an independent business unit within the agency. The intern unit is confronted with a real communication problem. Real client. Real responsibility. Real expectations. Real money. Real freedom.

This internship program model caught national attention last summer when Crispin Porter + Bogusky auctioned their summer interns (38 students) on eBay. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly! The prominent ad agency received 44 bidders and the winner, Brammo (an electric motorcycle company), became the intern unit’s client for a mere $17,655.

Participating and interacting with students is complex, but giving students the content they crave isn’t.

Lately I’ve been doing some research on long-tail searches about specific company internships (I know, nerdy). The goal is to figure out what students type into search engines and thus how they search for internships. I’ve been amazed at the volume of searches that are company specific. For example, instead of typing in “internships” more and more students are typing in “JP Morgan Internship” (4,000+ searches/mo), “Google Internship” (16,000+ searches/month), or “IBM Internship” (8,000+ searches a month). Your can check your company’s search volume here. This presents an opportunity for companies that create content to harness these searches.

You should go google “Your Company Name Internship” and “Your Company Name Entry Level Job” because that’s exactly what students are doing. Web presence and content are becoming increasingly more important because they are a student’s first interaction with your employer brand. Companies need content that supports these searches and ranks highly.

We always try to show best practices that we see in university recruiting, but this one is a fun video to the tune of Rushmore shown below.

With a Flip cam, PC or Mac, and some video editing software, this can easily be done for your university recruiting outreach as well. I would even recommend making this one of the intern projects as things wind down this summer.

When was the last time you put yourself in a student’s shoes and applied for a job through your company’s website? Better yet, found your company’s job on a career service site and applied through it. What was it like? How many steps did it take? Was it intuitive? Did it make sense? Did you understand the process? Did it leave you with an exceptional branded experience?

User experience matters and most companies have a terrible student applicant user experience. This is a huge opportunity for differentiation.

I recently conducted a survey with academically top-performing students. I wanted to deep dive into the process they went through in applying for jobs/internships. I thought for sure that the number one complaint would be the evaluation process – students who are frustrated by antiquated evaluations (resume and GPA screens, etc). To my surprise, that frustration was a distant second. In fact, most students have come to accept the fact that they will be unfairly evaluated and thus apply to a ton of jobs.

First of all, why is it so hard to spot good ones?

(A) It’s tough as academic achievement no longer differentiates:

- With the average A level grades for all students going to University being 280 points or BBC

I’m usually a few weeks (or months) late catching up on all the magazines that are delivered. So as I was catching up on a past issue of Time magazine the cover article (“Should Schools Bribe Kids?”) from the April 19, 2010 edition caught my attention. The article on page 40 titled “Is Cash the Answers?” is about a Harvard professor and scientist who conducted an experiment in four cities testing the validity of using financial incentives in the classroom to motivate children to do better.

Reading the article brought back the memory of being paid for good grades by my parents. Oh how we loved report card day! During my high school years (and my brother’s) my parents paid us $20 for an “A” and $10 for a “B”. No money was paid for a “C” or lower because a “C” was not acceptable in our house. As I read the article it hit me that I had never asked my parents why they paid us.

So I called my dad and asked him about the decision to pay for grades and he said, “Your mother and I paid you because we felt that getting good grades was your job and it was what you were supposed to be focused on. Remember, we discontinued the allowance with the grade payment.” (Side note – I never remember getting an allowance.) But my parents didn’t pay for grades in college so I asked why the payments stopped thinking his answer would be that because they were paying for college. But no, his answer was “we figured you were old enough to figure out how important grades are in college and if you couldn’t figure that out then you shouldn’t be going to college.” He added, “We actually felt this way your senior year in high school too but decided to pay anyway.” [For those wondering if grade payment worked my brother and I never made “C’s” and for me - I graduated high school with a small academic scholarship and graduated USC with honors. That would be the real USC – University of South Carolina.]