Spotlight for Career Services Professionals, April 25, 2012
Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals, April 25, 2012 

When engaging college students in the virtual world, employers can greatly enhance—or greatly damage—their relationships with these job candidates, simply by the type of experience an employer provides.

Gerry Crispin, co-founder of staffing strategy consulting firm CareerXroads, recently spoke about the importance of the candidate experience when engaging students in the virtual world during a NACE Face2Face event hosted by Ernst & Young in New York City. Crispin offered six rules for employers to implement:

1. Know the value of your candidates. You can and should measure the return on making a better quality hire tied to providing a great candidate experience, as well as the cost of resentment for providing a bad experience.
2. Walk in your candidates’ shoes by learning firsthand what they go through when applying for jobs. Research Crispin cited shows that 53 percent of recruiters have applied to their own jobs, but only 7 percent of employers have “mystery shopped.”
3. Listen to your job seekers at every stage of the hiring process. For example, ask candidates for feedback when they research, when they apply, and so on.
4. Ask candidates about their communication preferences and then use the media they prefer. Can candidates use mobile phones to do anything during the application process? Can they check their resume status, chat with a recruiter, or navigate to your firm’s mobile-enabled career site?
5. Answer candidate’s questions truthfully. They might ask how frequently the position comes open or what happened to the last person in the open position. Make sure to provide this insight as best as you can.
6. Deliver what you promised during the application process.

Following Crispin’s presentation, breakout groups comprised of mixes of employer and college members discussed key topic areas. Employer members offered several tips to their colleagues, including:

• Having “lunch and learns” with career center staff and key faculty members so they can hear firsthand about an organization’s opportunities while the employer strengthens its brand.
• Strengthening campus partnerships to learn the best ways to market to students and reach student organizations with students that fit their recruiting profiles.
• Using campus connections to overcome the turnover of student group leadership.
• Conducting webinars for job candidates between offers and acceptances to keep them engaged with the organization.

College members detailed efforts to become more efficient and effective by:

• Shortening career counseling sessions from 60 to 30 minutes.
• Eliminating poorly rated seminars.
• Breaking down in-person events on aspects of the job search into short videos or podcasts so students can access them when and where they want.
• Adding fresh perspectives and content to the career center website by enlisting employers to serve as guest bloggers.
• Having a diversity advisory board made up of students.

For more information about NACE’s Face2Face events, see www.naceweb.org/face2face/.