How Small Businesses Recruit at Colleges

Involve your marketing organization with your recruiting efforts. Remember that during recruiting all potential applicants are either potential customers or know potential customers, so to maximize your results, be sure you understand the dual nature of your approach.

College recruiting. Whether is makes sense for a company to engage in college recruiting depends upon how many and what kinds of employees it needs to hire. Because campus recruiting is expensive and because so many of the recruited graduates leave their new jobs within a year or two, some companies have ceased such recruiting altogether. Instead, they concentrate their efforts on attracting those now-experienced employees who are leaving their first jobs.

For many firms, however, college recruiting remains a popular and effective means of finding employees for entry-level, managerial, technical and professional positions.

What colleges should you choose to recruit from?

Local recruiting is the cheapest and easiest.

To meet equal employment goals, a company can recruit at colleges with predominantly black populations and at women's colleges. In some situations, ignoring these schools, in fact, could be interpreted as discrimination.

For top-notch engineers or specialists, it may be necessary to recruit at distant universities.

Who acts as the recruiter?

The companies who are most successful at college recruiting make recruiting a line manager's function. The recruiter:

• must be familiar with the company's products, people, and organization in order to give an accurate picture of where the company fits within the industry and where the candidate fits within the company.
• must be able to answer complicated questions about the company and about the candidate's field of study.

Even if your organization is small, it can:

• give students an accurate picture of the business
• describe career opportunities and benefits in detail
• send its best people out as recruiters.

How can you maximize the effectiveness of recruiting at other educational institutions?

For many entry-level jobs,

• local high schools,
• vocational institutions, and
• business colleges

are a good place to find employees, some of whom will already be quite proficient at a particular skill.

To develop a good relationship with a school and win its cooperation in your recruiting efforts, get to know the following individuals before you have a recruiting need to fill:

• the school's guidance counselor
• placement officer
• the faculty teaching the skills you are interested in.

Keep these people informed about your company and its employment needs and encourage them to recommend qualified students.

Invite the staff and interested students to your plant or office for a tour and send a representative to speak to students. Establish goodwill by accepting invitations to talk about career opportunities. Many schools sponsor career days designed to help students formulate employment goals. Participate in these projects to attract recruits. Relationship-building is key to recruiting success in working with educational institutions.

Work-study plans offered by many high schools enable students to gain real work experience while continuing their education. By hiring work-study students, a company gets part-time help while training and evaluating possible future full-time help.

If you're going to distribute recruiting literature to these schools, be certain that it's written with the audience in mind. Keep it simple and straightforward, but don't talk down to the students. Students with little work experience want to know what to expect on the job and what you expect from them.

Recruiting from schools with a large population of minority students and emphasizing at every school the company's interest in hiring women and minorities (or men for traditionally “female” jobs) will help you meet your social and legal responsibilities as an equal opportunity employer.

Reprinted with permission. © CCH