Spotlight for Career Services Professionals
Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals

Last year, Jeff Brzozowski and Suzanne Helbig collaborated to create a worksheet for recruiting organizations and colleges to use together to leverage career center resources and improve recruiting outcomes. The worksheet was developed for a panel and workshop they were facilitating during the 2017 Mountain Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers Conference.

“In the course of developing the content for that particular session, we thought we needed to establish a baseline of essentials necessary to be effective in college recruiting,” says Brzozowski, manager of university relations at Travelers.

“Between recruiting organizations and the campus, there are mutual goals. Career services wants to help employers find the students they’re looking for and that’s what employers want when they come to campus. This resource intersects both those worlds.”

The worksheet has 19 identified areas of focus presented in question form. Some of these are:

• Do I have a plan or strategy on timing of when to recruit on campus?
• Do I have an offer/acceptance timeline prepared and in accordance with campus guidelines?
• Do I apply creative ways of leveraging existing methods of reaching students?
• Have I invited my career center partners and other key players into my local facility or business operation for a tour and review of business goals, environment and culture?
• Do I leverage my partners beyond the career center effectively?
• Am I able to speak to the corporate culture of my firm and the differentiating factors that separate my organization from others in the same field?

The worksheet also includes space for users to note action items or suggested opportunities for improvement.

Helbig, associate vice provost in the Division of Career Pathways at the University of California, Irvine, says there are several ways the worksheet can be used.

“On the recruitment side,” she explains, “it can be used as a checklist of best practices and kind of an inventory of things that if an organization isn’t doing, it should consider doing. The organization can use it to audit its current recruiting practices, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of those practices.”

Meanwhile, career services professionals can use it as a conversation starter and a tool to use with recruiters about how to get the best return on investment on their campus.

“It provides a broad menu of options to consider,” Helbig notes. “Together, recruiters and career services professionals can talk about some mutual goals, and pick and choose strategies from the list that help them both have the best outcomes.”

Brzozowski continues, saying that the assessment component is a key to maximizing the process.

“An employer could also assess the areas that are most important to it and then identify where it’s weakest,” he says. “It can focus on those overlapping areas as a means of prioritization so it has a starting point. It’s at the appropriate level of assessment to have a conversation about several of these areas within its recruiting framework.”

While the worksheet covers a lot of ground, it is by no means prescriptive, Brzozowski and Helbig insist. In fact, it leads to using other resources and methods, and is easily adaptable.

“If you look at the worksheet carefully, there are a lot of tools embedded within it,” Helbig says. “There are suggestions for meeting agendas and topics. There are ideas for recruiters to increase their visibility and engagement on campus beyond the career center. These tools come to life when a recruiter and a campus meet and use it.

“Recruiting organizations and career services offices can take this worksheet and make it their own. It can be organic, living, growing, evolving depending on their needs. Every organization, every campus has a slightly different character and flavor to it. I would suggest that they use our baseline best practices and add on to the sheet where it makes sense for them.”