Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals

More than 70 percent of employers identified their university relations and recruiting (URR) department as a component of human resources, according to results of NACE’s 2017 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey Report.

Only 28.3 percent of employers identified their URR structure as a stand-alone recruiting department. (See Figure 1.)

For the survey, employers were asked to identify their operational structure as centralized, decentralized, or hybrid. This is the first year employers have been able to define their recruiting operational structure as “hybrid,” which means that acquisition efforts are coordinated between a dedicated university relations staff and representatives from operational divisions. Overall, 52.7 percent of responding employers identified their recruiting operational structure as hybrid.

By department and operational structure, it was most common for employers’ URR departments to be a component of human resources and operate as a hybrid (39.0 percent).

Data collection for NACE’s 2017 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey Report took place from July 19, 2017, to August 1, 2017; 301 firms participated. An executive summary is available on the NACE website. The full report is available to those at participating organizations through MyNACE > Research Reports.

Figure 1: URR Department and Operational Structure