18 minute read
Attraction
Once you have decided to recruit graduates into your organisation, the next step is to attract graduates from your identified target audience. Marketing and branding is yet another area in which graduate program managers and the team need some knowledge in order to meet their graduate recruitment requirements. There are two key components of attraction:
Building your employment brand Promoting the opportunities offered by your organisation.
Many organisations will employ an advertising agency to assist with developing a campaign strategy and marketing materials; however, some are able to leverage their internal capability.
Building an Employment Brand
Many organisations already have an employment brand. This brand may be the same or similar to their product or other branding, and synonymous with candidates as belonging to a particular organisation.
“Employment branding is a targeted, long-term strategy to manage the awareness and perceptions of employees, potential employees, and related stakeholders with regards to a particular firm. The strategy can be tuned to drive recruitment, retention, and productivity management efforts. It works by consistently putting forth an image surrounding management and business practices that make your organization an attractive, ‘good place to work’.”
(Source: ER Daily, ‘The 8 Elements of a Successful Employment Brand’ by Dr John Sullivan, 23 February 2004)
By positioning yourself as an employer of choice and clearly articulating your offering to candidates, this should result in better quality applications for your graduate program recruitment.
What factors should you consider when evaluating or creating an Employment Brand (often also referred to as an Employee Value Proposition, or EVP)?
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3. How well do you understand your target audience? • Who are they? What are their defining characteristics? What are their competencies, values, skills/academic backgrounds, aspirations? • What are their key drivers and needs? • When, where and how do they start looking for graduate opportunities? When are they not looking, but receptive? What is the competitive marketplace you’re playing in? • Who are your direct (industry) and indirect competitors? • How are your competitors perceived? In what ways are they more or less desirable to your target audience? • How do your competitors activate their brand? When do they go on campus? What activities do they participate in? What activation channels (physical, online) do they use? What feedback (anecdotal) or competitive intelligence have you gathered? What is your current Employee Value Proposition (EVP)? • How are you perceived by your target audience?
How would you like to be perceived on matters that interest your target audience? o
What are your organisation’s core values?
o o
o What are the main benefits to working at your organisation?
What are the compelling examples of these benefits at your organisation that will resonate and appeal to your target audience?
How do these different qualities interact to give your organisation its uniqueness and differentiate it from other, competing employers? Which brand perceptions are: o o o
Negative and accurate? Can you address these internally then re-brand yourself?
Negative and inaccurate? How should you tackle these misperceptions?
Positive and accurate? What can you leverage and use as the core of your EVP, as long as it is relevant to the needs and aspirations of your target audience?
EVPs can reflect the current state of your organisation. Alternatively, an EVP can be aspirational in nature; a reflection of where an organisation wishes to be if it has started a process of transformation, a situation increasingly common to many companies in today’s world.
Importantly, your employment brand or EVP should never suggest or promise attributes that aren’t true of the organisation if it wants to both attract and retain engaged and committed employees in the mid- to long term.
Marketing Materials
There are a range of options available to recruiters to deliver your employment brand and provide information to candidates. These include your company website, online advertisements, brochures and handouts, digital and physical banners, emails and ‘freebies’. You could also utilise existing annual reports or product literature from your organisation to provide general information for candidates. However, as these are produced for purposes other than graduate recruitment, you should ensure that material is engaging before it is distributed.
When preparing recruitment marketing materials, other people in your organisation may need to be consulted e.g. the marketing department or a brand manager. You may find that your organisation has strict brand guidelines which dictate what you can (and cannot) do with respect to promoting your organisation.
When developing recruitment marketing materials, here are some points to consider:
What message are you trying to convey? Is it about organisational culture, employment opportunities, training and development, the recruitment process, or a combination of all of these? Once you have determined the message and information you wish to convey you can determine the medium (e.g. brochure, video, website etc.). How many touch points and mediums should you use? How frequently will you need to produce a new version of your recruitment materials? Is the content (e.g. annual profit performance, product offerings, graduate salaries etc.) likely to become out-ofdate? Try to keep content generic to allow for re-use. Who will produce the materials? Do you have in-house facilities for design, copywriting, photography, printing, and dispatch? If not, you will need to engage an outside specialist, and prepare a thorough brief, defining scope, budget and deadlines. Who is going to be profiled in your marketing campaign? For example, do you need a quote from your CEO, an appearance by recent graduates in a recruitment video or a case study for your website?
In the case of printed materials, how many copies will you need? This will depend on what you are using the material for (e.g. mail outs, careers fairs and presentations). You should also make sure you send extra copies to university careers services for their collection. Careers services can provide student numbers for your target audience in the case of mail outs, but there are no fixed rules about the number of copies you should have printed for other activities. It is always best to err on the side of caution and print more than you estimate you will need so as not to run out. It is valuable to keep a record of how many copies you send out (and to where) during the year as this can assist in planning the following year. Putting a brochure or website together always takes longer than you expect – it could extend to six months or more. For example, if you want to get your materials into circulation or posted in time for campus activities in March, you should start work on this material in September. If you are going to be changing your collateral, using a new supplier or have tight internal approval processes, you may wish to begin even earlier. And remember, you may also need to get approval from your internal legal or brand team if changing previously-approved content. With the advent of the web and online application processes, the need for additional flyers or handouts has reduced. Ask yourself the question: Can this information be supplied online if we direct candidates to our website? If you are producing additional materials, ensure it complements existing materials. With regards to the cost of printed materials, generally the larger the print run the lower the ‘per unit’ cost. Get quotes on different volumes and determine what best suits your needs and budget.
Promoting Your Brand
Once you have established your employment brand and created tour graduate marketing materials, there are several ways in which you can promote your brand and the opportunities available.
Relationships with University Career Services
University Careers Services are a good first point of contact for graduate recruiters. Strong relationships here are crucial, not only to ensure that they are comfortable recommending your organisation as a potentially ‘good’ employer to students, but also to provide help and advice in times of difficulty.
What should you do to maintain an effective relationship with careers services?
Strategically identify which universities you will target (it doesn’t necessarily need to be them all) based on the degrees and qualities their graduates possess. Provide the careers service with copies of your materials, provide organisation updates, and develop a relationship where they can approach you for further information or clarification about your organisation or graduate program. During, or at the end of each recruitment process, provide them with an overview of how their students’ applications proceeded; how many offers you made, and how many were accepted. You could also provide feedback to the service on the performance of their students at interview or during other steps of the assessment process. Offer the careers service help if they need it. They may ask for assistance with careers events and other initiatives they are undertaking. It is not sufficient to meet careers advisers only during an on-campus program. Make a point of meeting them at other, less busy times. You can discuss your problems and find out what other organisations are doing. (N.B. You have the opportunity to network with careers advisers at AAGE functions.)
Provide open-day visits for groups of careers advisers, especially if you have significant program changes to announce. Make sure that your guests have the opportunity to talk informally and frankly to graduates who have recently joined your organisation. Consider offering places on your own training courses to careers services personnel. They will be particularly interested in courses on interpersonal skills, or objectives setting. Advise careers services early of your recruitment plans for the year so they can include these in their publications and material for students. Don’t make your brochures too large or irregular in shape. Many careers services have limited display units.
Note, careers services may not always be able to help you, and you may have to seek other avenues to increase student awareness of your organisation. There are ways to achieve this, such as liaising directly with faculties or students, or even collaborating with direct competitors/partners in your industry to gain additional visibility and impact. For example, both the legal profession and the accounting industry have a long history of collaboration.
Relationships with Academic Departments
If you are looking for contacts in specialist areas, such as engineering, computer science, pharmacy, banking or psychology, making contacts with specific academic departments within universities can be very effective. But how do you do this?
Talk to the university careers services initially. They will advise you on the people most likely to help. Enlist the help of fellow employees who graduated from a particular department. It is useful to gain support from colleagues, alumni or not, to develop these links. You are unlikely to have the expertise or the time to work on them yourself.
Next, consider what your organisation could offer in return. Here are a few ideas:
Scholarships. Academic prizes. To get maximum publicity from the prize, send photographs of the award ceremony to the campus press, or a press release to an institution’s publication. Make sure your prize is competitive with those offered by other employers. Ask appropriate colleagues who are willing to undertake liaison roles to offer their help with teaching, course advisory committees or project work. Persuade your organisation to offer research projects, training resources, vacation training or industrial placements. Look at all aspects of student sponsorship. Your organisation may be able to endow lectureships, professorial chairs, offer visiting faculty fellowships or research grants.
Relationships with Students
You will need to have a well thought-out strategy for persuading students that your organisation is worth considering as an employer.
If your organisation already has a strong and positive national reputation or a high public profile, this can provide inestimable value. But you should not assume that your work is done for you. People will expect high quality programs from such organisations.
Perhaps your organisation does not meet these criteria, or there may be other companies and organisation in the same line of business with whom you are competing for the same graduates. You will need to work hard to make yourself distinctive. The following sections outline some marketing initiatives you could undertake either on-campus or off-campus. All will take time, and many will require a budget.
On-Campus Activities
Careers Fairs
Most major universities run their own careers fairs and others (e.g. in the ACT) may run a joint fair. You should contact each institution's careers service to find out what they are offering in this area, and an annual calendar of all university fairs is provided on the AAGE web site for its members.
Careers fairs provide an excellent opportunity for employers to meet students who are in search of career information. Sometimes the students are not in their final year but are looking for information on vacation or industrial training placements. Depending on the programs your organisation offers, you should be prepared to response to a variety of queries.
Careers fairs offer the following advantages:
Advertise your vacancies. Meet a large number of students in one place over a relatively short timeframe. Raise your organisation's profile with students. Find out how other employers market themselves. Build your network of other graduate employers.
You should prepare a range of collateral to take with you to a careers fair, typically including a display stand, brochures/fliers/handouts, and freebies if you have them. To make your time on campus more manageable, you may also want to consider scissors, sticky tape, Velcro dots, tablecloths, pens, wet wipes, breath mints and water!
As an alternative to campus careers fairs, the AAGE also coordinates major fairs in major capital cities, called “The Big Meet”. These provide the opportunity for employers to access thousands of students from several universities in one day, cost-effectively. Details of The Big Meet timetable and registration can be obtained from the AAGE.
Presentations/Information Sessions
Presentations to groups of students, aside from providing information, are intended to give the audience an impression of what your organisation is like. As a result, they are very similar to your other marketing materials – helpful when good but potentially damaging to your brand if not.
To ensure a good campus presentation, first know what you are trying to achieve. Be very clear about the intentions of your message. Are you telling the students about your products, your history, your selection process or your graduate program? Certainly, some of this is valuable. But don’t forget to talk about what it’s like to work with you, what graduates are expected to do, what others have achieved, and how graduates are trained and developed. Authentic insights are what students will be looking for.
When deciding who will make the presentation, a team approach has its advantages. If you have representatives from all recruiting areas, you could outline the various opportunities available and handle any questions that arise, but be aware that a large team may up too much time and reduce the ability to
make your presentation informal. However, a team should include men and women, and, most importantly, recent graduates. If possible, staff should be alumni from the university you are visiting.
The timing of presentations should be decided based on your closing date, other on- and off-campus activities, and potential clashes with other employers. Careers services will assist you in planning and publicising your information session. You could also use your own networks to promote the information session, for example through student societies.
Career Workshops
Some universities organise recruitment and career related workshops for their students. These workshops provide students with information, skills and support to prepare them for the graduate recruitment selection process. Workshops commonly focus on matters such as interview skills or resume writing. Employers may be asked to participate in these workshops, either as a presenter or as a case study. Similarly, you may offer such a workshop to a student society via a sponsorship arrangement.
It is important to remember that whilst these workshops are useful in raising awareness of your own organisation, their primary purpose is to provide help and training for students. Hence, if you are asked to present at such a workshop, your main focus should be on delivering neutral and impartial advice, rather than promoting your own organisation, so you should set the style and delivery of the information accordingly.
Sponsor a Student Society
Many student societies will seek corporate sponsorship to assist them in providing information and services to their member base. Based on your target audience, you can identify possible student societies who could assist you in reaching these students. Ensure that you understand the sponsorship package you are agreeing to, and what you will receive in regards to branding and access to students as a result. Be careful to check that your brand or logo will be used appropriately, and advise the student society of any guidelines around this. In instances where you are a key sponsor and providing a large monetary investment, you may wish to mentor the committee or put other reporting controls in place to protect your investment.
(N.B. The AAGE has a comprehensive list of contact details for well over 300 student societies via its SocList resource – available free of charge for AAGE Members.)
Leverage Your Time
When exploring activities to promote your employment brand, it is worthwhile determining how you can allow for scale and utilise multiple ‘touch points’ to maximise the effort that you put in. For instance, if you give a skills workshop on campus, is it possible to provide the slides to other universities online with an audio narrative (podcast)? Do you have the resources to video the session and share it online with nontarget universities or more universities you aren’t able to visit?
Off-Campus Activities
Whilst the majority of activities to attract graduates occur on campus, you may choose to bring the students to you as a way to further promote and differentiate your organisation. Site or employer visits can be organised with the assistance of a faculty contact or student society. Alternatively, you might invite students with whom you already have some form of relationship, for example they may have registered on your website for earlier recruitment activities.
Liaising with university staff and student societies can be advantageous to gain an understanding of ‘when’ to host a particular event, as they will have a good understanding on university semester dates, exam
timetables, and study breaks. It is advisable to ask students to register for your event to gain an idea of numbers expected to attend and assist your planning. However, note it is not unusual for a significant percentage of registrants to fail to turn up on the day.
These site or employer visits can be used to great advantage if your workplace is different from other employers or unique to your industry. It allows a student to picture where they might work should they be successful in gaining a placement with your organisation. And the size of the visiting group may allow you to develop a more personal relationship with the candidate.
All of this should have a positive impact on your application numbers and on acceptance rates. But remember to select those who will be involved in hosting the site visit carefully. Consider selecting staff from previous graduate intakes who will further establish a link with the student group. The use of case studies in this environment can be very effective as well, as you are showcasing to the students a real life example of the work done by your organisation (a ‘day in the life of’), so that they can envisage a career with you.
Undergraduate Programs
There are a number of undergraduate, or feeder, programs that an organisation may adopt to act as an extended promotion and recruitment tool prior to graduate program recruitment.
Vacation Employment/Internships/Clerkships
Vacation employment gives both students and employers an opportunity to examine each other more closely. It is essentially a ‘try before you buy’ approach. Typically students are recruited for vacation work during their penultimate year of study, although this varies for different industries and disciplines.
It usually involved offering paid employment over the summer or winter vacation, or both, for periods of two to twelve weeks; however, some organisations offer longer internships of 6-12 months (full time and/or part time).
Vacation employment programs should include a thorough orientation and exposure to graduate level or ‘real’ work.
Industry Based Learning (IBL) or Co-operative Employment
Some universities deliver courses that involve a compulsory or optional period of paid work of up to one year. This employment usually takes place between the second and third year of study but the placement may be taken at other times depending on the structure of the course.
Traineeships or Cadetships
Traineeships and cadetships involve full time employment with part time study (or occasionally involve a combination of full time study and part time work.) Students are recruited during their final year of high school, and work for employers on gaining university entrance. Participants in these schemes are usually given time off to attend lectures and tutorials, and they are also given financial assistance with their studies.
Best Practice in Undergraduate Programs
It is important to offer meaningful, challenging work to vacation, co-operative and cadetship students. As the purpose of these types of placement is usually to identify and retain talented students for the longer term, participants must be provided with:
A thorough induction Supervised work or projects Appropriate training Achievable objectives Realistic and constructive feedback.
An undergraduate program is also an opportunity for you to ‘sell’ your organisation to potential recruits, so make sure they have opportunities to be exposed to the organisational culture and senior management. If they are able to build a peer network and feel connected to the organisation they are more likely to accept an offer of graduate employment from the employer at the end of the program.
Throughout the placement (and at the end of the placement), employers should seek feedback from participants regarding the appropriateness of the work, any mentoring and training provided, and how they were managed. Similarly, feedback should be collected from the line managers, supervisors and mentors who interacted with the students during the placement. All this feedback should be used by employers to modify their program for future intakes.
Note, it is also important to provide feedback to participants throughout the placement, to help them understand their progress, strengths and development areas.
Summary
The purpose of the activities described in this section is to increase the awareness of your organisation amongst students and encourage them to apply to your program. You do not have to participate in all of these activities, but the more you do the more you are likely to achieve.
