Best vs Right colleges for your campus recruitment

Choosing colleges for conducting campus recruitment drives is one of the biggest challenges for corporate today. If you are a company that has newly joined the campus recruitment bandwagon and are looking for some efficient ways of identifying the “best” or “right” colleges for hiring candidates, stay till the end of this post to understand how to go about it.

Although there is no shortage of talented candidates in different colleges, identifying such colleges and hiring candidates from them before your competitors reach the spot is extremely important for a recruiting team. The HR teams spend countless hours planning their recruitment drives to visit as many colleges as possible and recruit the best candidates from top colleges for a particular job profile.  Yet they fail to hire suitable candidates from them since these potential candidates are either disinterested in joining the new firm or are already recruited by other companies. To find a solution this issue, it is necessary to understand the regular trend followed by recruiters while they choose the colleges to go and hire candidates.

Why are you unable to recruit candidates from the best colleges?

Recruiters consider colleges with a good brand name, and those that record maximum successful placements, to be the best colleges since they are known to produce talented candidates with great skills.  But these top ranking colleges may not result in the successful hire of desired candidates for a new company that wishes to conduct a campus recruitment drive in them. Here are the main reasons:

• Candidates are not interested in your job profile
• Candidates are not aware of your brand
• Top candidates are already placed
• Your assessment tests are not good enough to evaluate candidate skills
• You do not have much experience in conducting a campus drive

How to identify the “best” colleges to recruit?

Instead of focusing on premier colleges that are targeted by maximum recruiting companies to hire candidates for the various job profiles, shortlisting colleges based on the skill sets you are looking for will fetch you the right candidates who will increase the productivity of your firm. Following are the main aspects to consider while selecting colleges to conduct recruitment drives:

1. Candidates with desired skills and exposure: Focusing on candidates desired skill sets and exposure rather than on the “right” colleges helps the hiring team to identify the best ones that can offer good candidates for the company. Going to premier colleges just because they are the right ones may not solve the purpose since you might end up hiring average students, with the top performers getting hired by other companies.
2. Students interested to join your firm: In top colleges, the average students or the bottom 25-40% alone may be interested in joining an organisation since the crème de la crème may be interested only in joining big MNCs. If you switch your focus to other colleges, chances of finding students genuinely interested in your job profile are high. These colleges then become the best options for you to conduct recruitment drives as this helps in increasing the talent pool and also the number of candidates joining the firm.
3. Higher percentage of joining candidates: Colleges that have students interested in the job profile of a particular company lead to a higher percentage of candidates joining these companies. Focusing on identifying such student masses will be advantageous for a hiring company to shortlist as many candidates as possible and onboard the best among them. Therefore, instead of thronging top colleges with a low percentage of interested candidates, companies can visit those that guarantee a higher joining percentage of candidates with the desired skills.
4. Colleges whose alumni work for you: Performance of the alumni determines the type of candidates a company can expect to hire from these colleges. Also, visiting colleges whose alumni have worked longer with a firm and grown into big leaders themselves helps the company to find suitable candidates with desired skill sets. Therefore, conducting recruitment drives in diverse campuses and hiring the top performing candidates, instead of relying on premier colleges for good candidates, allows a company to increase its talent pool and find the best candidates for the job profile.
5. Colleges allow pre-joining training for selected candidates: If colleges accept for pre-joining training sessions for the shortlisted candidates, it will be an added advantage both to the students as well as the hiring company. This is because the candidates will get a better insight into the company’s work structure and culture, and will be able to start work without any hassles when joining.

Conclusion

When it comes to choosing colleges, it is a good decision to visit those that are right for you; that is, those colleges that match your skill requirement in the students. Relying on top colleges may not lead to a successful hire since they may have a low joining ratio compared to others. To identify the right colleges look out for those that match the skill  set and exposure you are looking for, the colleges that agree for pre-joining training, the campuses whose alumni do not switch too fast and have grown into business leaders themselves, and those whose candidates require least amount of training before they join their respective teams.

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