Spotlight for Career Services Professionals

How can you best help the employers that recruit at your school? The first step is to understand their particular needs.

In general, employers responding to NACE’s 2017 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey said that identifying talent early through internships and co-ops, branding their organizations to campuses, and recruiting diverse candidates are the most important factors to their university recruiting programs.

With branding, for example, survey results show that employers tend to choose a branding technique based on its ability to help them connect with students. They favor high-touch activities as branding techniques. To brand their organizations, they most often attend career fairs, build relationships with key faculty members, and conduct campus information sessions.

How can your career center help employers with branding and their other key pursuits? Following are some ways:

• Hold meetings each year with employers to discuss their changes in hiring needs and necessary qualifications, skills, and more.
• Perform initial reviews or quality checks to ensure that student applicants meet the minimum qualifications of a job posting.
• Recommend student clubs, activities, events, and so forth that might help recruiters identify targeted candidates.
• Collaborate with and introduce faculty to help establish connections that might not exist between the employer and their preferred academic departments.

While there are myriad ideas for supporting the recruiting efforts of the employers that recruit your students, the best place to start is to ask your employer partners what they need and for suggestions for how your career center can help.