Today’s higher education employment landscape is more competitive than ever. Higher education institutions are facing a challenge as the job market booms amid “the great resignation.” Many employees question whether they want to return to in-person work, and increasingly, the corporate sector is competing for the same candidates as HigherEd—and corporate roles often have more remote flexibility than campus roles. Colleges and universities are under a great deal of pressure to recruit and retain world-class faculty and staff.
However, it’s still possible for your institution to stand out from the crowd. Building a robust recruitment marketing strategy can help shape your message and improve your hiring outcomes. Recruiters need to be strategic and creative while leveraging the right technology to capture the best applicants.
Take a look at how to build a recruitment strategy that delivers value and draws top talent to your doors.
Create an Attractive Institutional Culture
Building an attractive and positive workplace culture is vital to an effective recruitment strategy. With websites like GlassDoor and LinkedIn making it easy to learn more about potential employers, your brand is more public and more important than ever. And colleges and universities are not just competing for talent with each other, but with other industries like large tech corporations with well-known employee perks and cultures.
When recruiting talent, your institution needs to highlight the positive benefits of joining the team. How have you supported employee physical and mental health in the last year? Are you offering remote flexibility or childcare? What on-campus benefits do you offer? What is unique about your location and community? What are you doing to create an environment and atmosphere that accommodates different beliefs, ideas, values, attitudes, and behaviors? Well-being, flexibility, and work-life balance are highly valued by job candidates today.
This information should be front and center in your job descriptions and on your employment pages, making it clear why a candidate should want to become a part of your faculty or staff. With PeopleAdmin’s streamlined HigherEd Platform, you can make your institution’s benefits clear and show candidates your forward-thinking mindset by refining job descriptions, connecting with multiple job boards, and funneling candidates into a seamless, digital application experience.
Demonstrate your Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
An institution’s commitment to diversity and inclusion can be an attractive pull for top talent. Colleges and universities that actively strive for equity and representation stand out from their peers. PeopleAdmin’s HigherEd platform can give you a deeper understanding of your D&I efforts by offering easy visibility into EEO metrics for both your applicants and your current staff. With our tools, you can see if EEO categories are impacting hiring, promotion, or tenure decisions by department or college. PeopleAdmin can also help you connect with diversity-focused job boards to reach a broader field of potential employees.
Diversity and inclusion efforts shouldn’t just be a box to check. They should be woven within the fabric of your institutions. In addition to hiring diverse teams, colleges and universities must work to create supportive and inclusive environments to retain them. This will give you a competitive edge in the talent market.
Create a World-Class Applicant Experience
Your hiring and interview processes really matters – they can shape a top candidate’s first impression of your institution and can impact their eventual decision to take a position. The process is more than just your chance to get to know a candidate; it should also introduce potential hires to your culture, procedures, and other faculty members.
Outdated and slow hiring processes can cost you great talent as well as time and money. Many employers now make job offers within a week of the interview process. Today’s job-seekers want things to move quickly, want easy access to job applications, and expect more communication from potential employers. To stay competitive with the corporate sector and other colleges and universities, it’s time to leverage technology.
PeopleAdmin’s Applicant Tracking System can help you manage your recruitment process to win the best talent. With our centralized and mobile-friendly system, candidates can apply and update their applications from anywhere, and you can automate your communications so your top candidates stay up to date.
Win the War for Talent
Today, job-seekers are more informed — they know what they want and expect you to deliver it. This is particularly true for young professionals (35 years of age and below) who stay in their jobs for about 20 months and have high expectations for seamless digital experiences.
Building an effective recruitment strategy starts with what your institution can offer potential employees. Without the right culture, seamless candidate experience, or clear diversity efforts, you can invest heavily in advertising new positions but fail to fill them with the right talent. Colleges and universities must give their applicants a reason not just to join their institution, but to stay.