Planning Your Advertising Campaign
Advertising Options
After the preliminary work regarding the recruitment campaign has been performed, your vacancies and any relevant information about your organisation need to be made known to students. This could be a long-term initiative (work placements, sponsorship, etc.) or a short-term, single activity (an advertisement in a newspaper or on an employment website). More likely it will be something in between, due to factors like cost and time coming into play.
Using the media for graduate recruitment in our media-driven society is a handy vehicle, but this type of advertising can be very expensive, and targeting can be difficult. Nevertheless, the greater visibility your vacancies have, the easier it is to produce advertisements and PR with long production lead-times and long shelf-lives. It is possible and profitable to form links with a number of organisations and bodies.
The first step is to know what you want to get out of any relationships you might forge, and what your target group should be. Clearly your time-scale plays a part, and this depends on your recruitment strategy. Links with Careers Services are vital for recruitment processes that are more than a ‘one-off’ employment of a small number of graduates. As noted above, Careers Services and careers libraries are often the main starting points for recruiters.
Not only can Careers Services offer advertising and interviewing facilities, they can also give valuable help in finding the right people to talk to within other parts of the university, and provide feedback on what you've been doing.
Apart from payment for the use of facilities, these links need not be costly. Careers Services often welcome help in terms of providing an employer's view of recruitment on careers boards and at student workshops, and many Careers Services produce printed bulletins where an employer's view on a specified topic is valued. Some Careers Services welcome sponsorship of events or publications. The simple thing to do is to explain what you are trying to do, articulate what help you need, and ask how you can help them!
Most Careers Services seek primarily to inform and guide students, as well as helping them to find a job. Do you have special knowledge of a topic that can help students, or particular insights into your industry? There are lots of opportunities for helping each other. As a matter of courtesy, inform Careers Services of any other relationship or activities you have on campus, and be mindful that Careers Services personnel can do a lot to help you achieve what you want.
If you are able to target certain university departments, links can be useful here too. The relationships can be similar to the ones you might set up with Careers Services. Don't expect departments to highlight certain students for you, as they have a moral obligation to remain impartial. Some, however, are happy to circulate information to a subset of their students, and this can be a productive and narrowly targeted source of advertising. In return, you might be able to provide opportunities (perhaps on an annual basis) for placements, scholarships, sponsorships and so on, or serve on departmental boards where a degree of input from industry is valued. Some organisations go as far as to jointly fund research and lecturers’ posts, while others play a significant part in course development. More generally, work placements, sponsorships, summer courses and even part-time work, are seen as major activities in the recruitment strategy of a number of organisations. This may be restricted to a number of university departments, or available to all students. The advantages to the students of a short- or long-term placement are widely recognised. So is the usefulness of the in-depth assessment by the organisation that made the placement possible. Work experience not only helps students develop work-related skills but also provides a taste of workplace culture and thus helps graduates adapt more quickly.
The advantages of work placements as a means of recruitment are less clear. Without doubt, a year-long exposure to a student undertaking a substantial work placement, together with appropriate management, is the best means of assessing that candidate's potential long-term contribution to the organisation. However, it can be an expensive process, when the cost of selection, salary and loss rates is taken into account. In some cases this cost can be ameliorated, as the student can make a contribution to the organisation, but the degree of cost-effectiveness is difficult to quantify.
Of course, if work placements are to be a major feature of your recruitment activity, they need to be carefully targeted and advertised in the same way as other recruitment activities. There is PR value among the placement students, their peer group, university staff and Careers Service staff associated with organising placements. Presumably the effect is both a positive and negative one. A bad experience with an organisation is as influential as a good one!
Advertisements to make students aware of placement opportunities can be placed in teaching departments and Careers Services or displayed more widely.
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