2015 The 8 Questions Every Recruiting Team Should Ask
Jul 17, 2015
2015The 8 Questions Every Recruiting Team Should Ask
Question #1: Am I visiting the right schools?
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Answer: If you’re not measuring, you won’t know.
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Too few employers have a strategic and effective target school strategy. Their decisions are often based on internal politics, habit, or completely at random. They wind up wasting precious time, manpower, and money by visiting schools that don’t yield results.
Target School Dashboard
Target School Strategy Development
Universum resources available to help:
Understand how your performance at target schools differs.
Develop a data-driven target school strategy to know which campuses
are best for you.
How top employers address this:
Understand the nuances of different schools, and use a data-driven approach to select where they should and shouldn’t visit.
Question #2: Are all of our recruiters sharing a unified
message?
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Answer: Sharing stories about the right things is
complicated.
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Even companies with some of the most robust communication strategies struggle to communicate these ideas on a day-to-day level. Quite simply, big ideas are often tough to translate into real stories that resonate – and that means that candidates who speak to different recruiters can receive different messages.
Activation Cards
Universum resources available to help:
Equip your recruiters to know what and how to communicate
with potential candidates on campus.
How top employers address this:
On top of creating an EVP, the best employers equip their recruiters to talk about these things in a consistent and approachable way.
Question #3: What do candidates want to hear about
most?
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Answer: It depends on who your target candidates are!
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In an effort to appeal to as broad of a talent base as possible, many companies try to communicate everything: we’re innovative, sustainable, international, fun, challenging, exciting, full of opportunity. The problem with this approach is that, the more messages companies communicate, the more diluted and ineffective these messages become.
Universum resources available to help:
Employer Brand Report
Talent Insight Report
Understand how your target group perceives your company.
Understand what is most important to your target group.
Understand that the first step to successful communication is understanding what their target group wants.
How top employers address this:
Question #4: What do students think about my
company? What do they think about my competitors?
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Answer: It depends on who you ask.
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Just like different students want different things in a company, different students also have varied perceptions of you as an employer – and of your competitors. It’s important to ensure that the right messages are resonating, and that they are distinct from those of your competitors.
Universum resources available to help:
Employer Brand Report
Understand what is most important to your target group,
as well as how your target group perceives your company
and your competitors.
How top employers address this:
Regularly check in on student perceptions of their brand, as well as their competitors’ brands, and find areas where they can set themselves apart.
Question #5: How can I reach more of the right talent?
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Answer: Invest in large-scale and more targeted
branding initiatives.
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Even if you have a small-scale, targeted recruitment strategy, it’s still important to raise your overall brand attractiveness to make sure you appeal to this group.
Activation Solutions
Reach a broad audience through advertising in the
Wall Street Journal.
Engage with targeted talent groups and tell the right story
on social media.
Universum resources available to help:
Combine a targeted branding approach (for example, campus visits and social media) with more broad communication campaigns to drive awareness and brand engagement.
How top employers address this:
Question #6: Will my offers be accepted?
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Answer: Ask previous candidates!
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Too often, recruiters do so much heavy lifting through the campus season to identify and attract the right candidates – only to have their offers declined at the end of the fall. In addition to wasting precious resources, this forces them to start from scratch to fill necessary roles.
Universum resources available to help:
Accept/ Decline Study
Understand why previous candidates accepted or rejected your offer, or why your interns
aren’t converting to full time hires.
Ensure honest and objective answers by using a third-party
to survey.
Get to the bottom of why their offers aren’t being accepted by asking candidates, in order to uncover quick fixes or larger issues at hand.
How top employers address this:
Question #7: How should I approach social media?
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Answer: Use data, insight, and people to guide your
strategy.
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Everyone knows they should be on social media –but few people know how to do it effectively. Many companies don’t know where to begin: should their careers Facebook roll up into their corporate page? Who should be responsible for managing it? It takes time and resources to produce content that resonates with your target talent.
Universum resources available to help:
Blueberry Social Measurement
Activation Solutions
Discover how your messages are being interpreted and received on social
media, compared to your competitors.
Engage with target talent groups and tell the right story on social media.
How top employers address this:
Develop content that appeals to their target group, and measure its success, adjusting where necessary.
Question #8: How will I know that my efforts are
yielding results?
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Answer: What gets measured gets done.
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At the end of the day, your efforts mean very little if you’re not sure you’re on track. By measuring progress and tracking your results, you’ll be able to continue to improve, as well as ensure that your efforts are paying off.
Universum resources available to help:
KPI Dashboard
Employer Brand Report
Set actionable goals and measure the success of your employer brand and
employer branding activities.
Understand how your target group perceives your company and your
competitors.
How top employers address this:
They set out specific, achievable, and challenging goals in order to look back at their branding efforts and truly measure the difference.