Hot trends, and the importance of ROI in campus recruitment – an interview with Jeremy O’Krafka

It would be nice to think that the silver lining of the current slowdown, is that there might be some further balancing of expectations between employers and future grads.  I have been following the school-to-career transition very closely since 2000 and in that time it has been an incredible roller coaster ride.  New grad recruitment in my opinion in far too elastic based on economic swings:  market is up and candidates want the moon; market is down and employers pull way back or out completely.  Both sides would be well served by a period of relative equilibrium to reestablish some trust in the process.

Two of the hot trends that I’ve seen emerge in campus recruitment over the last year are social media and hiring metrics.

Social Media:  It almost seems redundant to talk about it with all of the media attention that Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter have received recently as they relate to job search and recruitment.  Two examples of well executed campaigns that I’ve seen are TD Money Lounge’s “The Hunt” job search video series, which leverages it’s retail Facebook page; and Careerealism’s effective use of Twitter to engage job seekers.  And of course the list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning TalentEgg and the important role it plays as a virtual career bridge for students entering the workforce.

Hiring Metrics: There are a number of progressive employers such as Whirlpool, Merck and Vale Inco who are implementing systems to extract meaningful metrics such as cost-per-hire by campus; salary summaries by school and degree; and candidate pipeline statistics.  ERE has posted a number of insightful articles recently on both recruitment metrics and hiring source.  Campus recruiting leaders who are best equipped with real-time metrics by campus (source), are the best equipped to make the right strategic and budgetary decisions for their organization.

Measuring ROI relative to the performance of the hire over the related recruitment cost, helps make an employers strategic planning much more objective.  Deciding which campuses to visit, events to attend and media to employ can become a muddled process over time if there isn’t a solid cost-results comparison.  Defaulting to a legacy plan may mean that while one employer is yet again holding a stack of brochures at a dead career fair, their competitor is engaging dozens of tech-saavy students participating in an on-line discussion forum on Facebook.  The problem is that you really don’t know unless you have a system to actively track where you meet the contacts in your pipeline and track them through the full campus recruitment cycle–which may be years!