Employers should maintain presence, look beyond career fairs
Even though 2009 wasn’t a big year for hiring, Sun Life Financial maintained its presence on university campuses and is ramping up for increased recruitment in the coming year.
Executives at the insurance and financial services company talked to classes, conducted presentations on what their business is about and maintained relationships with various deans and faculty members last year, said Sandy Delamere, vice-president of human resources at Sun Life Financial Canada.
“We look at this as a year-round activity,” she said. “It’s all in the spirit of really having the universities get to know Sun Life and the type of company we are, as well as inspiring the faculty at the different universities to really have a good image of Sun Life so they can encourage their students to apply to Sun Life as they graduate university.”
Which is exactly what more employers need to be doing if they want to recruit top talent from universities across the country as the economy improves, said Anne Markey, executive director at the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers in Toronto.
“Even if you are not recruiting in the current year, you can’t disappear off the horizon and come back in and expect everybody’s going to know about you and want to work for your organization,” she said.
Maintaining a presence on campus doesn’t have to be costly or expensive, said Markey, and can include sitting on a panel for career night, offering a case study students can use in class or volunteering at the career centre to critique resumés.
Employers also need to look beyond traditional on-campus recruitment because a lot of top students don’t attend career fairs since they’ve already found an employer through co-op or internship programs, said Markey.
“Integrating some sort of a work study, work-integrated learning experience, into your recruitment cycle is essential,” she said.
These programs also give employers the chance to test drive students who often know all the right responses to interview questions but might perform quite differently in the work environment, said Markey.
“You may put on your best performance for the interview, or during the recruitment season, but when you have someone in your organization for four months, 12 months, 16 months, that’s a whole other picture,” she said.
Sun Life uses its summer student program to see if the students would make good permanent employees, said Delamere.
“In essence, we’re recruiting even in advance of them graduating by way of having a sneak peek at how they perform and what the fit is like,” she said.
These students can also serve as good ambassadors when they’re back on campus and can refer other like-minded students to the company, said Markey. IBM and RIM do a good job of this, with students eager to go back on campus and sell the company because they had a good experience, she said.
Sun Life often pairs new graduates with business leaders and HR representatives at career fairs so students can hear what it will be like to work at the company, said Delamere.
Young people gather information about jobs through their trusted networks, including professors, parents and friends, said Lauren Friese, founder of TalentEgg, a Toronto-based career website for students and new graduates.
Recent graduates working for the company are often seen as being part of that network so they should definitely be included in on-campus events, she said.
“It’s super effective and acts as that sort of recommendation from a friend,” said Friese.
Student participation at career fairs has been declining over the past couple of years so employers should consider creating more specific career fairs that target certain programs making students feel like the career fair will have something to offer them in particular, said Markey.
Many students just don’t know how the traditional recruitment cycle works, with career fairs at the beginning of the school year and offers being made by Christmas, said Friese.
Also, top students are often busy at the beginning of the year with classes and extracurricular activities, she said.
“Employers need to make themselves available when top students are looking,” said Friese.
To do this, employers need to go online, she said.
“It makes sense to have a very, very well-thought-out online strategy,” said Friese. But that doesn’t mean starting a Facebook group or advertising on Twitter, she said.
While the vast majority of students and recent graduates look online while job searching, very few of them use social media for this purpose and view employer ads on these sites as intruding on their personal lives, said Friese.
Instead, organizations should focus on search engine optimization so employers turn up at the top of online search results, she said.
Organizations should also ensure careers pages are clear and offer detailed information about what it’s like to work at the organization, said Graham Donald, president of Brainstorm Consulting in Victoria.
And if employers want to go the social networking route, LinkedIn is the best place to start, he said.
“LinkedIn’s whole purpose is business networking,” he said. “Students are more and more creating profiles there.”
While Sun Life is looking at using social media more in recruitment, the company’s main focus is to ensure the work experience lives up to what recruiters tell students on campus, said Delamere.
“We’ve integrated the business leaders into the recruitment process from the beginning, so that has strengthened that alignment,” she said.
Organizations need to ensure job postings are honest and thorough so students know exactly what they’re getting, said Donald.
“It’s important to be authentic. If you don’t offer work-life balance, don’t mention it,” he said. “Park the lingo and special jargon. What (they) want is a feel of what it is like to work in your organization.”
Career centres are the most effective places to post jobs because students feel those jobs are more aligned with their specific qualifications, said Donald.
But no matter what other initiatives an organization undertakes, having employees on campus to share their experiences of working for the company is still the most effective recruitment tool, he said.
“Campus recruiting is a relationship business. The more face-to-face interactions they can create, the better,” said Donald.
