How to conduct pre-branding activity before campus drive

If you’re a company looking to fill vacant positions in your company through campus recruitment, you first have to start with pre-branding or employee branding. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Recruiting Benchmarks Survey Report, employer branding is the most important aspect of the typical college recruiting program. It is through this step of building an attractive employer brand that the students become aware of and are more inclined to join a company. Students are not going to believe in your brand unless they have been made familiar with it in the past. Pre-branding will help introduce your company to the students.

Remember your competitors are also looking for the same students you are, the only way you can beat competition is employer branding. It is the key to promoting your company culture and reputation so that you can attract high-quality job applicants. Recruiting a candidate from these colleges does not start the first time you meet them at the campus recruitment drive, it starts before that. A student’s decision to join your company depends on what they have read, seen and heard about your company. And this is why it’s important to create a brand that these students know, trust and believe in.

Key points to consider before starting your pre-branding activities

Before you start your pre-branding activities, here are a few important points to keep in mind.

1. Identify the region and colleges: It’s only smart for a company to identify the region and colleges that they want to target before proceeding with planning their pre-branding activities. This will help in getting a better understanding of the colleges and the students and help design the pre-branding activities in-line with the interest of these colleges and regions.
2. Identify the pre-branding activity: Once you’ve identified your target colleges, the next step is to identify what type of activities you would like to incorporate to promote employee branding. There are various engagement activities a company can resort to, to promote branding in campuses. To do this you can study the colleges and interests of the students and come up with interesting strategies based on your findings. It is at this stage where you will decide whether you want to host a college event, conduct a competition, hold a seminar and more.
3. Identify how to carry out the activity: There are 2 ways you can carry out your pre branding activities, you can either choose to do it yourself or you can seek external help and outsource your pre-branding activities to an agency.
4. Connect with colleges to plan & identify the right time to carry out the activity: After shortlisting the activities, you can then connect with the college’s Training & Placement team to select the right time slots to carry out these activities.

How to pre-brand

Now in case, you were wondering what are the activities you could consider to improve engagements and succeed at employer branding, here are a few ways you could do that.

1. Host seminars/webinars where the company introduces itself to the students: Depending on the availability of time and resources, you can organize a seminar or webinar to educate students about your company and create brand awareness. This is a great way to infuse curiosity in students and also ignite their interest in your brand or company. You can use this platform to educate the students of various colleges about what is it you do and also share insights on the benefits your company can offer them in case they would consider joining your company.

2. Sponsor college fests: Most colleges have a business fest every year, by choosing to sponsor these fests, you give your company or brand a great opportunity to gain exposure among the students. These business fests attract a huge amount of students from various colleges, giving you a larger audience to interact with and sell your brand to.  

3. Host competitions: Another very effective way to create brand awareness in colleges is by hosting competitions like product launches, crisis management, technical and coding competitions. This will not make students aware of your brand but will also help you realize where the most number of talent and skills lie. This will help you in choosing a better college to target for your campus recruitment efforts.

4. Collaborate with colleges to teach a particular subject related to the jobs in your company: With competition to get the best fresh talent getting tougher, companies have even taken to collaboration with colleges to teach a particular subject related to a company’s job role. By choosing to introduce and teach a subject in line with your company’s work you can create interest in students and also assess the talent in the college. In addition to this, the students also get first-hand information and training about the job they may consider taking up in the future.

5. Hold training sessions or workshops on specific topics related to your job role: In case teaching an entire subject is not in your threshold, you can consider holding a 2 to 3 day workshop or training sessions on certain topics related to your job profile. This will give students an idea of the work you do as a company and can also be used as a platform to increase interest in your brand.

Benefits of Pre-branding.

1. Better edge over the competition: Pre-branding helps students get to know your company and brand. People are drawn to familiarity, therefore the students will be more prone to work for your company because they have heard of you and are familiar with your brand name.
2. Building trust: Pre-branding on campus will help create brand awareness among the students which in turn builds trust. Research states that students are more inclined to trust a brand they have previously engaged with or have read or know about.
3. Better candidate pool to choose from: Through pre-branding, you make students aware of your company and what you do, creating interest among them. This will help you attract a larger talent pool to choose from when you initiate your campus. To know more, visit https://pod.ai/employers