Digital Marketing Profiling Graduates
Engagement is key
Today’s graduates just don’t believe paid-for corporate messaging: they want to know what it’s really like to work at a firm. The rise of community and peer-to-peer advocacy of roles initiated a shift in the market from old- fashioned advertising to candidate engagement. James Uffindell, CEO & Founder of Bright Network, explains how graduate marketing is changing…
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results suggest that the media model of posting a job advert and waiting for students to reply is becoming increasingly less effective.
have some bad news for you. Every year, UK firms spend over £200 million on finding the entry-level
talent they need to grow their businesses. Not only is competition in the market growing – the AGR predicted an 11.9% increase in graduate vacancies in this year alone while 25% of organisations are increasing their recruitment budgets – but the evidence suggests that the old way of doing things is no longer working. 44% of firms failed to fill all of their graduate vacancies this year and 20% of graduates apply for roles that don’t even match their interests.
These results suggest that the media model of posting a job advert and waiting for students
to reply is becoming increasingly less effective. You might be able to sell a sandwich in this way, but when it comes to jobs and careers, for millennials, this mode of advertising is out-dated. In a world when they see thousands of marketing messages every day, both online and offline, millennials are the most sceptical and unpredictable audience of all.
The good news, however, is that there is a way to stand out: it’s called ‘engagement’. Millennials are a curious and inquisitive bunch – they want to know what a job will be like. By engaging them about your organisation, culture and the types of roles you have and what it’s like to do them, you can steal a march on your competition. It can be achieved in a number of ways: from interactive, high-touch events and
tailored content rich marketing, to one- to-one career consultations (both in person and over the phone) and webinars to fully communicate your unique propositions.
One of the most powerful engagement tools is publicly profiling members who have gained graduate roles. After all, the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer (a yearly
measure of which marketing channels inspire the most confidence) shows that existing employees are trusted more than job adverts. While such an approach might sound costly, a proper engagement strategy yields a superior ROI on marketing budgets. Graduates trust other graduates, and your current intake might be your best corporate advocates.
Engagement Case Study – Deloitte Female Campaign
Rob Fryer, Head of Student Recruitment at Deloitte, explains how the campaign worked: “Like many professional services firm, we’re keen to attract as many high-quality female applications as possible. We partnered with Bright Network to raise brand awareness amongst top female first and second year undergraduates, identify and fast-track high quality applicants into our Applicant Tracking System and introduce our internship and graduate programmes to our target market. Together we segmented a selection of over 6,000 top female undergraduates according to sector interest, degree background and graduation year. Then we launched a full telephone engagement campaign of highly-consultative calls to the 6,000+ students eligible for internship and graduate programmes. This was used to test brand awareness and association, address queries or concerns, share positive brand messages, discuss the internship and graduate opportunities and to encourage candidates to submit a ‘fast-track’ application”. Victoria Ellis, Programme Design Manager, continues: “To deepen candidate engagement we also ran an email campaign and Facebook community. This campaign generated 1,000+ fast-track applications from top female candidates for internship and graduate programmes. We’re now in the middle of processing these applications and the great news is that we have already made multiple offers!” n
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Graduate Recruiter |
www.agr.org.uk
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