Emerging trends in campus recruiting: thoughts from URx Conference

Earlier this week I had the honor to join thought leaders at the URx Conference, an event exclusively focused on university recruiting. During the sessions with individuals representing both companies and colleges I observed something I haven’t seen at a conference before: consistency. While the desire to improve college-to-career transitions is not surprising, I was shocked that every panel, presentation, and discussion focused on the same core problem with the current system. Specifically, the annual info sessions, career fairs, and on-campus recruiting is a high-stakes process that inherently limits the candidate pool to a subset of students from the same schools, majors, and backgrounds.

The other pleasant surprise was that the attendees recognized that the benefits of fixing the process go beyond mission, philanthropy, and community support. While solving this challenge will help the over 40% of recent grads who are under or unemployed, it will also improve employee retention (over 50% of new hires leave in the first year), diversity, performance, and so many other metrics.

When it came to tactics, there were a breadth of ideas presented. However, rarely were these ideas mutually exclusive, and all focused on building and nurturing relationships between students and companies. To that, a few of my favorite perspectives included: 

• Leo Cortez of Airbnb shared his insights on the high cost and effort to participate in career fairs, and both he and Lyft’s Thomas Hughes highlighted the value of creating “multiple touchpoint opportunities” to engage students before the recruiting season and as early as freshman year.
• Microsoft’s Brooke Simpson discussed that it is sometime difficult to get buy-in from hiring managers and other internal stakeholders on recruiting from beyond the same, typical schools (though Microsoft found a creative way to do so).
• Both Naomi Thalenberg of SAP and Caroline Cunningham of Intuit highlighted the challenges of competing against more well-known companies, and SAP’s approach to build its brand with students.
• Davidson College’s Dean Byron McCrae talked about his school’s efforts to create opportunities for companies to engage Davidson students to execute short-term professional gigs, an effective approach that is becoming increasingly popular.
• Corey Twitty of Intuit talked about how he “sold” the sales team on the benefits of hiring recent grads, as they could provide immediate support. In the same way, Google’s Indira Zamor highlighted that hiring managers at technology companies need to recognize that great talent can come from beyond just those students pursuing tech majors.
• Conagra’s Jylian Feliciano shared her perspective that so many D&I efforts fail because they are not authentic or sustainable (and has been shown time and again) or use AI and algorithms that don’t work. In contrast, Kim Holmes discussed Discover’s collaboration with the UNCF to provide internships to students attending HBCUs.
• And conference organizers Wahab Owolabi of Rubrik and Jess Boyd of Autodesk both conveyed the value of campus recruiting, not just to address the short-term needs of a company, but to build a long-term employee base that is engaged and excited in driving a company's long-term success.

What was great is that none of these efforts required one to tear out an existing applicant tracking system, spend millions for premium marketing services, replace academic curriculum, or rely on unproven technology. All of these can be addressed easily, and provide both immediate and long term value for companies, Career Launchers, and universities alike. In fact, during my presentation on Experiential Recruiting, I highlighted a few examples that any of us can leverage immediately.

Please let me know if you’d like a copy of that presentation or if you have any other thoughts from the event.

For those of you who were not able join, on Wednesday June 12 at 1:00 CT, I will be presenting on the topic again. Please register here to join me.