Symplicity Taught Us How to Recruit on College Campuses in Today’s Environment
Latest Trends in Student Interests Surprising
Armed with his corporate database from thousands of university customers and a recent customized survey of 2500 college juniors and seniors looking for jobs, Symplicity CEO Matthew Small gave the audience a primer on how to most effectively recruit college students today.
(1) College Students Value Salary and Work-Life Balance the Most. Company brand name is the least important. “Gen-Z trends point to authenticity,” Matt reported. “They want to work for companies that stand for more than what they’re selling or how they advertise themselves.” Matt emphasized that “[t]his is a big area of opportunity for small to mid-sized companies that are looking to compete for early talent.”
Matt was one of several speakers throughout DEAMcon23 who recommended recruitment messaging segmented to the recruitment audience, whether targeting veterans, individuals with disabilities, or now, college students. Matt added this important tip for recruiters: “Gen-Z is known as a mission-driven generation. They want to see positive change and to make an impact. Companies need to help connect the dots for them and make it clear what the day-to-day responsibilities are and how they will contribute to the company’s mission.”
Wait! What is Symplicity and how does it help Employers? It describes itself this way:
“Symplicity Recruit is the favored job recruitment platform among enterprise and SMB employers seeking to hire qualified candidates before and after they graduate from college. Recruit introduces our trusted clients to a curated network of leading universities around the world.”
(2) Employer Websites Remain the Most Valuable Recruitment Tool for Companies Seeking to Attract College Students. “The number one most valuable channel to students is the employer’s website at 72%,” Matt reported from his student Survey. “The second most valuable was a personal network at 67%, followed very closely by the university career center at 65%.”
“You need to make the [campus] career center a core part of your recruiting,” Matt repeatedly suggested throughout his presentation.
The surprise to us: “Social media is the least valuable to students today,” Matt reported. He explained that “nearly half of Gen-Z adults say they don’t trust social media platforms much or at all for news. And they lost trust in brands over social media and discontinued use of a product. I think it is a safe assumption that there simply is more apprehension from Gen-Z when consuming content on social.”
Matt also reported that underrepresented students found [campus] career centers more important in their search compared to white students. He emphasized on several occasions that companies recruiting at colleges and universities need to beat a path to the doors of the campus career centers, introduce themselves, and explain their mission and needs.”
He explained the position of trust the campus career centers enjoy with its students this way:
“The career center has vetted the jobs coming into the career center, so students are not left on job boards with zero guidance. Generally speaking, students are expecting more relevant high-quality jobs there at their university career center.” Matt noted that the career center is often using Symplicity AI to match student and job and typically presents a curated list of available jobs likely to be of interest to the student. Matt observed, too, that students were going to the career center ‘to find a job.’”
THREE OF MATT’S PRACTICE TIPS:
- “Make sure that your website is up to date.”
- “Tap into career centers.”
- “I would not prioritize social media over other channels.”
(3) PTO, Remote Work, and Mental Health Benefits Lead the List of Preferred Benefits.
“We found [from Symplicity’s college student Survey] that PTO, remote work and health care ranked as the top three important benefits,” Mat reported.
“If you have a generous PTO policy, promote it to students,” Matt advised. He also suggested that if you offer “unlimited PTO or give the last week of the year off, make sure you bring that to the attention of your college students. Mental health support services as a benefit are less standard but are also very important and can help you differentiate,” Matt noted.
“You would be shocked at the level of mental health support services that have become available in higher education. The number of students that have sought reasonable accommodations for things like a disability or depression is skyrocketing. And students do not know anything else. When they’re leaving university to go into the workforce, they are highly competent, smart, hardworking people. They are just moving from a world in which they had these services into an unknown corporate world where they may not. To the extent you offer mental health benefits, they want to hear about it. Make sure to tout the benefits that you may have,” Matt emphatically suggested.
Matt also noted that students are “really prioritizing stability and security instead of stock options and company equity following the bursting of the tech bubble.”
(4) DE&I Is Important to Successful Recruiting “Our student survey shows that 77% of internship candidates and 78% of full-time candidates consider DEI in the workplace to be an important or very important factor,” Matt reported. “That number is even higher when broken down by ethnicity and gender, with it ranking just after salary in work-life balance for some groups,” he added.
“There’s been a lot of talk this week [at DEAMcon23] about DEI and why it is important and about compliance,” Matt observed. “It is also really important for recruiting and not just for minority students. It is the vast majority: 78% of candidates called it very important to them. It is important for all of the right reasons, but it is also important to attract top talent,” Matt mused.
“For women, diversity and inclusion is the third most important aspect of a job when searching for opportunities, beating out job duties, benefits, and location,” Matt reported, “with 87% saying it was important versus 60% for men.”
“Similarly, when looking at the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace across ethnicities there was a disparity among groups, Matt’s survey found. “90% of Black, 85% of Hispanic, and 82% of Asian students felt diversity and inclusion was important versus 55% of white students.”
Matt emphasized, however, that “It is not enough simply to ask about DEI. Students, particularly underrepresented students, are actually evaluating companies based on their DEI efforts and real [corporate] action has to be taken just as much as salary and benefits in terms of touting why this is important to your company and actually proving it,” Matt observed.
(5) Student Tips to Recruiters About How to Reach and Engage Them. Symplicity’s Survey also asked students what they recommended recruiters do to reach them.
Tip 1: The students said: “Remain personable and relatable.” Matt then explained that “A lot of students without experience may be intimidated by people in the workforce because you’re such an intimidating bunch.”
Tip 2: “Keep their schedules in mind,” Matt advised. “I know it may sound crazy, but college students are busy and can miss your open opportunities if it clashes with their class or part-time work schedule, especially in the middle of the day,” he added.
Tip 3: “Find other ways to advertise outside of e-mail. Our data shows that students don’t live in e-mail. They actually don’t like it. There’s a lot of noise out there. And by the way, getting a message to the student via the career center is much better than actually getting a message, let’s say from an employer directly sometimes. So it is: ‘Hey, there is something here for you in Symplicity. Our career center determined this is a good match, or this might be of interest to you, or students with similar backgrounds were successful with these,” Matt explained. “That’s what we do with the university, what our AI does. Match with the students. Much more appealing to students than a generic e-mail,” Matt suggested.
Tip 4: “Ask professors to make announcements in their classes or department communications.”
Tip 5: “Be helpful. Give them tips for interviews. Feedback, post-interview, is greatly appreciated by students,” Matt said from experience. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is again the same advice DEAMcon23 attendees heard from recruiters discussing both veteran recruiting and the recruitment of individuals with a disability: provide targeted resources for each segmented community.
Tip 6: “Cohosting events with student organizations such as industry panels is a great way to get students’ attention and reach out to the right group of possible candidates,” Matt advised.
Tip 7: “Students prefer more in person events, over virtual events.” The data are not consistent depending on where you are in the country, Matt reported, but in general, here is what it looks like:
“Students are as much ready to get back to in-person events as are employers. When it comes to the interview and discovery process, they actually like in-person. For career fairs, informational interviews, and formal interviews being in person the preference was 69% of respondents prefer to attend in-person career fairs, 62% favored in-person informational interviews, and 61% preferred in-person formal interviews versus virtual formats.”
“However,” Matt continued, “there is a slightly higher percentage of traditionally underrepresented students who prefer virtual. So you do need both. But you can’t really have an all-virtual strategy,” Matt concluded. “The best part about virtual is that it is efficient and less expensive. But if you can afford to get on campus and participate in these events, that is what students prefer,” Matt said summing it up.
TIP 8: (And it is a BIGGEE!) “Recruiters need to move quickly,” Matt announced emphatically. “62% of students in our survey say that a slow-moving interview process that is longer than a month from the first interview would deter them from accepting a job offer. Breaking down internal silos,” Matt argued, “to make the recruitment process go faster to get the top candidates can differentiate you. If you have the students that you want to hire, and you attract them, and beat out the competition, and you have great benefits and salary and brand, and you have the process down, moving faster can make all the difference from a student’s perspective. Cut unnecessary steps,” Matt strongly urged. “The hiring manager needs to be in lockstep with HR so HR is moving alongside the [selection] process in the background. All they have to do is give the simple green light.”
RAH, RAH, SIS-BOOM-BAH!
Go Get-Em Campus Recruiters! Happy Hunting!