There are a lot of ways you can measure university recruiting success, from the volume at which you are able to recruit, to the strength of your relationships with universities, to the performance of college grad new hires, and far beyond. But out of all the elements you can evaluate, which are the most important?
To determine which key areas to should focus your evaluation, start by thinking about how your company views success in the college recruiting space. There are certainly some general metrics you should care about, but your organization’s goals will be the deciding factor on what holds the most weight. For instance, a company that’s just launching a college grad training program will view success differently than a company that seeks to source exclusively from top-10 schools. However, even though each company will measure success differently, there are a few key metrics that every company can and should use.
Take a look at these three campus recruiting metrics your company should be using and consider how they can help you measure how well you’re meeting your goals:
College hire diversity as a measure of success covers many areas including the usual demographics every company should focus on, like gender and race, and not so typical factors, like the types of skills you’re hiring for and the universities you’re hiring from. Diversity in all those areas is an important consideration because you’re shaping the future of your organization. It’s not just about what your company needs right this moment. It’s about what you want your company to look in two, five and 10 years down the road.
Aside from the traditional demographics, it’s important to diversify the types of skills for which you recruit and the universities from which you hire. For instance, you may focus on recruiting for core business areas, but don’t forget that you can use college recruiting to plan and recruit for support areas as well. Additionally, diversifying where you recruit can help you grow relationships with a variety of schools and bring in candidates with an array of knowledge and skills. In life, and in recruiting, it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket.
It’s one thing to recruit new grads - after all, many are excited for any job opportunity - but it’s a whole other story to be able to retain those workers after they’ve gained experience and become acquainted with the industry in which they’re working. You’ll want to evaluate the number that make it past training, to the 6-month mark, and then each year thereafter. College hire retention is about more than just seeing success from your recruiting efforts. It’s also an important measure of the return on investment of these green, inexperienced workers. Are you training your competitor’s next employees, or are you investing in the future of your company?
Retention is of course an important campus recruiting metric, but to hire strategically, you need to understand how well these new hires are performing. A few good measures of college hire performance that you may want to take stock of are your intern-to-hire rate, termination rate, average performance evaluation scores, and percentage of college recruits in the top 50 or 25 percent of employees. These numbers will reveal whether or not your company is truly successful in college recruiting, and can guide where, who and how you hire to ensure future success.