How to Identify Right Campuses

Thousands of organizations in India today hire over 1 lakh graduates every year through campus recruitment. On-campus drives are a safer and easier way for companies to on board fresh talent when done right. Although this may sound easy, campus recruitment is tougher than you think. Without a bulletproof strategy, you may find yourself at the wrong campus, hiring the wrong candidates for a job in your company. So how do you overcome this hurdle? The first and most important step in campus recruitment is to identify the right campuses to conduct your recruitment drive.

Students see campus recruitment as a good job opportunity, with a very low level of competition leading to attaining easy entry-level jobs, where references are not necessary. As a company, you need to cash in on this point and ensure you target only those campuses where you are sure to get qualified and talented applications from students who are more likely to join your company.

If you’re a company looking to fill positions in your organization through campus recruitment, here are a few strategies that you should incorporate when trying to identify the right campuses for hiring.

Identify your hiring needs: The first step while choosing a campus is to identify your recruitment needs. To do that you can ask the following questions:

1. What is the job role?
2. What kind of skills are required for the job?
3. What basic educational background is required?
4. How many positions are you looking to fill up?

Once you’ve got the answers to these questions you can use this as a base to create a list of colleges that may fulfil these requirements.

Remember, when it comes to deciding which schools to target, first focus on determining the type of skills you’re looking for in potential hires. Next, look into which schools have expertise in academic programs that match those functional needs and then proceed with the below steps.

• Conduct hackathons and contests: The next step is to engage a large number of students from the selected campuses. How do you do that? By conducting inter-college events like hackathons and contests like crisis management, coding contents and so on. This will not only attract a large pool of candidates for you to asses but also help you narrow down on the colleges you want to target. Through these competitions, you can identify colleges that won most competitions and have the most number of talented students and hence target these colleges for recruitment.
• Student participation in events: Another factor to consider while choosing the right campus for hiring is identifying colleges whose students have participated in various conferences, conducted presentations, etc. This will help companies to assess the average talent level, confidence, and enthusiasm level of students from the different colleges and aid in choosing the college that has the most number of students who fall under this category.

• The industry trend: Before you decide which campus to host your recruitment drive at, it is also important to know what the industrial trends are when it comes to campus recruitment for your particular business sector. A little research about what colleges your competition is targeting, what are the top 5 colleges to target as per industrial standards and more are a few things you should research on which will help you make a better decision when choosing the colleges.

• Choose colleges based on the alumni factor: As a company who has been recruiting for a long time, you can choose your target campus based on the number of alumni who have been successfully on-boarded into your company in the past.

• Past experience: Looking into your past recruitment experience will give you an insight into which campuses had the most fruitful outcome and which colleges had the most talented students who were able to clear the interview and successfully join your company. With this data, you can make a better choice when deciding which campus to drive your recruitment efforts to.

• Budget: When choosing the right campus, the company should also take into account their budget and ability to offer the right compensation for the right students. It is important for companies to access the colleges they want to recruit from in terms of whether or not they can make the right offer as compared to what competitors are offering to the students of the same college. Research on the current market compensation standards of every college can give you an idea about which college to approach depending on your budget.

The primary goal of a company seeking to conduct campus recruitment is to bring in fresh talent. The main reason for this is to influx diversity as this has become a measured goal for most companies, if not all. The issue in achieving this goal is not the absence of diversity but the outdated campus recruitment strategy.

Traditional campus hiring includes hosting recruitment drives in too many universities, too many candidates to filter from, undefined expectations, rigorous competition among companies, and the most crucial set back is the huge amount of time and money spent on the same.

With today’s fast-growing industry, when it comes to hiring in-demand skill sets, as a company you need to take a brisk and more effective strategic approach to campus recruitment. This will help you move quickly yet smoothly through the hiring funnel to onboard fresh talent. And the best way to do that is with a handy campus scorecard; a progress report of many campuses compiled in one. By following the steps above you can create this scorecard that will let you know where most of the talent lies and help you decide the right campuses to target.

Now, we understand that this can be a lot of work and this is why it’s always a good idea to outsource this process of finding the right campuses to Pod.ai so your HR team can focus on other crucial steps of the campus recruitment process. If you feel your company can benefit from this service get in touch with us by visiting https://pod.ai/employers