Campus recruiting season presents a difficult scenario for talent teams.
For months, there’s total inundation. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of college career fairs to attend — each gymnasium, conference hall, and atrium packed backpack to binder with an eclectic student group looking to find their future. Oh, and don’t forget your competition is five feet away the entire time, trying to hire the exact same people as you.
To cut through the noise, your campus teams have to provide a high-touch pre-apply process. Connecting with students starts at the first interaction; you need to make them feel appreciated and important or else they’ll walk over a few feet to find a company who will.
But a campus recruiting strategy is a delicate balancing act: How do you effectively manage hundreds of student relationships at once, while keeping each interaction engaging? There’s just so many students and so little time. As a result, the organizations with the best systems in place — both pre- and post-events — are going to have the best chance to hire the best candidates.
Well, I’m happy to say we have the best university recruitment system. Functioning as both an effective candidate management tool and a powerful engagement tool, our Campus product is designed to support your campus recruiting 24/7. With features like flexible registration, ROI reporting, and automated nurturing, you can deliver an exceptional experience for both your campus team and your student candidates.
Let’s take a look at seven scenarios that prove it.
You have a virtual event for students around the country. How do you capture all of them efficiently?
In the not-so-distant past, campus recruiting teams would have to manually capture candidate information — a time-consuming endeavor that ate up massive chunks of their schedule. Today, AI can automatically capture thousands of candidates at once.
All you have to do is advertise your event attendance either through organic channels (like your social media accounts/career site) or on campus-specific platforms (like Handshake). To pre-register for the event, interested students simply text a shortcode to begin a conversation with a conversational AI assistant. This AI assistant is the candidate-facing feature of our campus recruiting software; it automates all pre- and post-event communication, while ergonomically storing student data to make attendee lives easier.
At first contact, the assistant prompts students for specific information: their name, major, GPA, etc. This entire conversation happens over text — a communication channel that college students spend 94 minutes a day using. Once qualified, the assistant messages them a specific time to meet with an attendee.
And just like that, the candidate has been captured. No logins. No passwords. Just a process that perfectly blends into the daily life of the target audience. And one that helps campus recruiting teams capture more candidates from anywhere, at any time, for any kind of event, while doing minimal administrative work.
A qualified student walks up to your booth at a career fair. How do you make sure qualified candidates don’t leave without an interview scheduled?
During events, unregistered students will often show interest in applying to open roles. It’s critical that these students get scheduled for an interview immediately, seamlessly — because if they’re not, you risk losing rock stars to the competition stationed right next to you.
Our Campus product ensures you can always strike while the iron is hot and guarantee an interview with potential top talent. Onsite, students can get screened and scheduled instantly via that same seamless digital experience — either using provided tablets at event stations, or after scanning a QR code on physical collateral. And campus recruitment teams (who know a good candidate when they see one) can enter students’ information themselves in minutes.
As a bonus, Wi-Fi isn’t even required for any information to be captured. So when the unfortunate (but common) technical difficulty occurs, top talent can still be scheduled before the opportunity fades away.
You just met hundreds of students at a career fair. How do your campus recruiting teams prioritize the best candidates to interview?
An overabundance of pipeline comes with its own set of challenges — with limited time to interview students, you’re not going to progress every candidate to the next stage of your hiring process. To accommodate this, our Campus hiring solution makes candidate prioritization simple.
Once candidates are captured, their information is stored in a CRM. Whenever it’s most convenient (be it before, during, or after the event), attendees can manually go into the Conversational CRM and filter the candidates by which attributes matter most.
Say a role’s most important attributes are college major and graduation date. You can evaluate all students across these attributes, and send interview invites to candidates with preferred majors and graduation timelines. Our Campus product also facilitates onsite evaluation, helping you swiftly identify exceptional students for streamlined follow-up.
All candidate ranking is user-driven; the AI isn’t making any decisions on which candidates are better than others. Rather, all minimum qualifications are screened out in the initial conversation with the AI assistant. So if you’re only hiring for software engineering roles, students that are majoring in literature won’t be added to your talent pool.
You now have to communicate next steps with all of your candidates. How do you effectively deliver the information?
Well, in short: You don’t. The AI assistant does. Depending on what part of the hiring process the candidate is in, the assistant will automatically follow up with next steps applicable to each role.
Early in the process, we’re talking about automated interview scheduling. Assistants sync with interviewers’ calendars and send open interview slots to each recommended candidate, notifying each interviewer when an interview is confirmed. No type of interview is foreign to the AI — multi-person, multi-room, and multi-location interviews are all scheduled without any hassle. So the candidate that needs to be immediately interviewed by the attendee on campus is scheduled just as easily as the candidate that needs to be interviewed virtually, next week, by three different managers.
Later in the process, corporate office visits, project information, and additional meet-ups can be automated as well. You can even bypass traditional college student forgetfulness with hiring automation: The AI assistant sends reminders to each student.
You just met a freshman that’s interested in your company but not ready to apply. How do you maintain the relationship?
Sometimes, promising student timelines or skill sets don’t align with your currently open roles.
Storing these people in a student candidate pipeline isn’t just a way to bolster candidate volume — it can ultimately increase your hiring event ROI. You can keep in touch with promising talent by funneling them into your recruitment CRM. Once in an appropriate talent community, you can have the AI assistant send targeted communication to keep your organization top of mind.
Sometimes, promising student timelines or skill sets don’t align with your currently open roles. Storing these students in pipeline isn’t just a way to bolster candidate volume — it can ultimately increase your hiring event ROI.
Once their qualifications do match your open roles, they can apply for a position using the information the assistant has already captured and logged. Simple, easy, and instant. And done without any user action from the hiring team, thanks to recruitment automation.
You attend dozens of events every year. How do you efficiently optimize your campaigning to each one?
The campus recruiting season is long, highlighted by months of travel, booth set-up, and conversations. It may be tempting to lean on muscle memory: templatized explanations, autopilot engagement. While this can certainly get you through a day, receiving a cookie-cutter experience is not what candidates want.
With our Campus product, you can customize assistant conversation templates, as well as campaign advertising, to each event. This maintains the simple candidate experience, while creating bespoke experiences that delight candidates. You’re able to send students in Ann Arbor “Go Blue!” messages while sending Roll Tide!” to students down in Tuscaloosa.
On the attendee side, all student information is segmented by event. So you’ll never mix up your candidates in New York and New Mexico.
Offer letters are sent in the fall, but students don’t start until the summer. How do you maintain engagement and excitement?
It’s time for the magical moment: the offer letter. Not surprisingly, this too can be automatically communicated via your AI assistant, either on the spot at the event, or after a few rounds of interviews. Once your candidate signs the offer letter, the AI can automate the onboarding process too. I-9 retrieval and background checks are sent via text, forgoing the often clunky user experience attached to legal paperwork.
In-between signing the letter and starting the job, you may want to engage the candidate to keep the momentum going. The AI assistant can be programmed to reach out to candidates at a predetermined cadence to ensure they don’t drop off before Day 1: Some organizations will simply send messages to spur excitement. Some will send content and tips. And some clients will use the assistant’s scheduling feature to schedule “lunch and learns” with other new hires or current employees.
The candidate is also able to independently benefit from the assistant’s presence. If they have any questions, the AI can answer them in seconds, minimizing confusion.
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Campus recruiting can be a whirlwind, with event attendees having to manage thousands of students across triple digit events. Conversational Events is an attendee's sidekick, helping them manage their student candidate pipeline and automate their candidate communication. Best of all, it helps simplify campus recruiting into a conversation: attendee, meet student.
