The Agnostic Approach That Will Boost Your Campus Recruiting Strategy

With the rise of virtual recruiting over the past year, employers have been able to work with more schools than ever before. This has accelerated the move toward an agnostic recruiting process, in which employers consider multiple schools, recognize more majors, and rebuild their tech stacks to support more data coming from more sources.

The Case for Agnostic

The advantage of being able to connect with any and every school is obvious: the ability to reach diverse and niche candidates who may have been in limited supply at previous target schools. In addition, considering more diverse fields of study further expands your candidate pool. However, many organizations are missing the critical third leg of the stool: taking a technology-agnostic position that gives you more control over your process.

Yello’s 2021 Fall Campus Recruiting Survey found that 53 percent of recruiters aren’t happy with the tools being offered by universities, as they take too much time for their teams to learn and effectively use. As the average number of schools from which organizations recruit grows, so does the pain of information collection and management. Now, many are reworking their tech stacks and investing in tools that can support data coming from anywhere.

Standardize Your Data Collection Process

When recruiting college students, you should be using your own technology as much as possible, rather than solely relying on university-provided tools. With a robust platform that accepts information from numerous on-campus and virtual events, you’ll gain greater insight into the totality of your recruiting process.

Using university-required tools doesn’t mean you can’t point candidates to your own system. Rather than collecting information on the school’s platform, include links that point candidates toward registration or application forms connected to your database. That way, you can reach the same audience but have all data fed into one centralized place.

At the same time, should a university require data from you, you can still run the reports necessary to match their own desired format. With such seamless information capture and transfer on your end, you have more control over your data and the candidate experience — not to mention increased flexibility to work with schools across the country.

Think Outside the Career Center

Keep in mind you can also take an agnostic approach to a school’s career center itself. You may be able to cultivate more targeted candidates by building direct relationships on your own with university departments, student groups, diversity programs, and individual professors or deans. The quality niche talent you seek doesn’t necessarily attend campus career fairs or use the career center’s resources — and you don’t want to pass them up.

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