Articles 
For most companies with a strategic view on college recruiting, early Summer is the peak time for planning and strategizing about the upcoming fall recruitment cycle. Avature Product Marketing Specialist Carina Lacour was recently joined by campus recruiting rock stars, Kersten Metz, Recruiting Manager, Lynsey Durham, HR Analyst of Duke Energy and Tessa Dolkas, Outreach Program Manager and Kate Blue, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager of NuVasive, for our campus webinar series about boosting campus recruitment efforts.
For companies like Duke Energy and NuVasive, attracting and engaging the best young graduates is a key part of their talent acquisition strategies. In fact, Duke Energy shared that 20 percent of their hiring is done by the campus recruiting team, which in 2016 included 250 interns and 123 co-ops.
Regardless of the speculation around graduate hiring and the overall job outlook, engaging with young talent remains crucial. Last year, studies showed that 78 percent of university seniors have a job lined up by graduation and 88 percent of seniors have had at least two job offers by graduation. (AfterCollege 2016)
Career fairs and on-campus events remain a key place to meet and talk to in-demand young talent: 88.4 percent of students attend career fairs, yet only 62 percent rate them as very effective (NACE). Why? Well, 19.1 percent of students say “there’s too much going on and it’s hard to stay focused.” (AfterCollege 2016)
In this blog post, we’ll share some insights from NuVasive and Duke Energy, and we’ll explore how HR technology has been key to transforming many of their recruiting processes for the better, particularly related to event planning, attendee experience, and demonstrating to management the ROI of campus recruitment.
Make the Best Impression On-Campus
Event planning and marketing is often a headache for recruiters using outdated legacy applicant tracking systems that don’t really allow for much flexibility. Avature Campus & Events merges the two worlds of event planning and recruiting to make campus recruitment truly strategic. Duke Energy shared how they designed their campus solution, by storing all event-related data in one place to ensure all recruiters and on-site people have the information they need. With an easy event approval process, Duke has also been able to track all information and costs related to each event.
NuVasive has also created one single place for all events, which makes it easy to not only be prepared for campus events but also to follow up with students afterward.
We’ve created an easy-to-use process that allows us to go paperless at career fairs and to capture key details in a compliant method. … We’ve automated the post-engagement process while being able to track important details…and we’ve already had approximately 2,500 prospects that we’ve actively engaged with from those events, so already a huge return on investment for the portal.”
– Tessa Dolkas, NuVasive
For Duke, they found that creating a web page featuring an overview of events and an easy sign-up process allowed students to find out more. Duke has been able to customize their page with just four required fields that the student must fill out, to ensure a quick sign-up.
Also, promoting campus events has been crucial. Duke has been able to leverage social media, Twitter especially, to share their sign-up page and talent community pages. This has had the effect of multiplying the amount of booth visitors at campus events from 12 to 75 attendees and encouraging candidates to join the talent community.
Ensuring a Fantastic Attendee Experience
Strategic campus recruiters know that the key to efficient recruiting and high-quality candidate experiences is a technology that supports your processes. Once the candidate has signed up for a talent community or an event, smart automated emails engage the candidate and give them the information they need. This also allows the recruiter to have a clear overview of the type of students they will meet at the event.
Once on campus, apps such as Avature Campus & Events mobile app can help recruiters, students, and hiring managers go paperless by digitally capturing resumes through Dropbox, Google Drive or a photo, as well as recruiter feedback, that are saved to Avature.
Recruiters now have the ability not only to capture their own notes in the portal but also to capture a ranking scale and candidate areas of interest. Post-event, we can then pull metrics from that information. We can see how many students we’re interested in for marketing and communication efforts. That has been really helpful to us.”
– Tessa Dolkas, NuVasive
NuVasive shared how, previously, they had to enter resume information manually into their ATS following an event, and how using Avature has enabled them to transform their processes
We streamlined the process so when you’re at the event, it’s easy. There’s no resumes, it’s just a quick entering of information, hand the iPad back, give a rating, and after, everything is automated. So there are no stacks of resumes that you’re trying to get back home.”
– Kate Blue, NuVasive
Duke also shared how at campus events recruiters can use Avature Campus & Events without relying on WIFI, and how they can register students, conduct interviews, do on-the-spot screenings, add student feedback notes, and rank students.” There is no fear of losing the information collected – once internet connectivity is restored, everything is saved in Avature automatically.
Demonstrating ROI for Campus-Related Activities
For campus recruiting, NuVasive found that it has been absolutely key to be able to demonstrate and present the ROI of their activities to upper management. Avature’s reporting capabilities offer a complete overview of the most meaningful real-time metrics. Filtering and drill-down options show valuable sub-reports and integrated tools.
We have built some pretty great dynamic reports. My favorite feature about the reports in Avature is the ability to take the URL of the report, put it into Excel, and then be able to refresh it. It’s been coined ‘Avature Magic Reports.’ Some people don’t believe me that it’s real-time data that you can refresh, so they’re like, ‘No that has to be magic…No, it’s not magic, it’s just Avature.”
– Kate Blue, NuVasive
Avature Campus & Events not only allows recruiters to be their best on campus and also show those efforts to management, but it also puts additional advanced tools at your fingertips:
- event metrics
- landing pages and email campaign metrics
- funnel statistics
- candidate time-in-process reports
- visual reports of hires/interns by source
- vendor ROI to understand how technology impacts performance
Making strategic campus recruiting a reality requires a deep understanding of where your efforts are best spent. An integrated technology platform like Avature Campus & Events gives your team the tools they need, to make smart decisions, engage high-quality talent, and deliver a great candidate experience.
For us, I can’t imagine having to work through a career fair without our solution. The campus and events portal has truly changed how we operate as an organization with all of our outreach events. If we didn’t have the solution, I think we’d be in a much different place in terms of success and ROI of these events.”
– Tessa Dolkas, NuVasive
Check out more campus recruiting resources below.
