This year’s college seniors are quickly approaching graduation, which usually calls for tons of recruitment activity on campus as top organizations compete to recruit the class of 2020. Yet, with campuses cleared out and courses moved online, there’s nothing ‘usual’ about this spring’s university recruitment. To secure the top new grads in 2020, recruiters will have to take a virtual approach to campus recruiting.
Reach candidates on the mediums they prefer
With all communication now taking place online, you’ve probably seen your email inbox turn into a complete nightmare. For students this includes every update on their classes, homework assignments, and any other school-related information, making it that much harder to cut through the inbox noise with a recruiting message.
SMS messages, on the other hand, have a 98% open rate and a 209% higher response rate than email, phone, or Facebook. Text communications are a great way to keep your new grad candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process with digestible updates on the status of their application, interviews, and hiring timeline. And by keeping your candidate in the loop, you build trust in and a personal connection to your employer brand. It's a win-win!
Schedule Virtual Information Sessions
On-campus career fairs give students a unique opportunity to truly vet out an employer before jumping into the interview process. While students often have some idea of what they are looking for, campus recruitment helps solidify this by exposing them to a diverse slate of organizations. Why not emulate this experience in a virtual informational session?
This is one of the many ways you can use ConveyIQ’s Interview Days scheduling, a feature that allows you to schedule interviews in which one interviewer (or presenter in this case) is paired with many candidates. Candidates are invited via email and simply choose their preferred time and date until the session is full. Make sure to advertise your informational sessions on your career page and follow up registration with a quick text reminder.
Let candidates interview on their own time
Transitioning from a structured in-person class schedule to a fully online course load comes with its challenges. Students are already under a lot of stress with final exams around the corner, and learning how to be successful in a completely new environment only adds to it. That’s why it’s critical for employers to be flexible in their recruiting process during these unprecedented times.
On-demand interviews allow candidates to take an interview any time, anywhere. Candidates answer a set of questions, have an allotted amount of time to prep, and record their answers to be evaluated by the hiring team upon completion. This is beneficial for hiring teams as well – in the time it takes to screen 15 candidates by phone, you can interview 100 candidates using on-demand interviews.
With a few simple virtual adaptations, recruiting teams can continue to ensure the personalized candidate experience necessary to attract and retain the workforce’s newest members. Curious to learn more about virtual hiring? Set up a chat with one of our digital recruiting experts today.
