Recruiting Engineering Students? Here's How to Get Their Attention

March 17, 2016 at 9:30 AM by Jessica Gilmartin

hiring college students

I’ll start with a very obvious statement: Recruiting top engineers, even at the college level, has become a massive challenge. What might be a little more surprising is how the top 10% of innovative companies are adapting to this new reality. The tried and true methods of campus recruiting, which haven’t changed much in 30 years, are being turned on their head with the advent of technology.

Let’s face it, if you’re a star programmer at Stanford or MIT, you’re likely absent from campus recruiting events. The last thing you’re going to do is print out 100 copies of your resume, just to be bounced around from table to table to get five minutes with a company you may or may not be interested in. Instead, you’re going to sit in your dorm room, build apps and websites, and get recruited online.

College recruiting is all about building excitement around your company brand. I often hear recruiters express concern that the direct sourcing method that works for experienced hires doesn’t translate to the college market, but making your company a sought after employer is not accomplished by handing out free pizza and t-shirts. Instead, your brand is a function of the relationship that you build with students. The more personal and thoughtful the relationship, the more it enhances your brand. The following are some of the brilliant ways we’ve seen our clients build their brand on campus, without stepping foot at a career fair.

Send a personal message, and make it clear you’re reaching out because their specific background and coursework is relevant to your company.

If they’re interested, immediately schedule an on-campus interview or phone call.

Do not (I repeat, DO NOT) buy a school email list, or go on LinkedIn, and find all the CS majors graduating in 2016 and send them a mass message driving them to your booth or your job posting. If you work for maybe one of five companies in the world, you can get away with this technique since your brand is so well-known. Otherwise, you’re doing more harm than good, since students generally associate spam messages with mediocre companies.

Instead, take the time to tailor a message to your candidate’s unique skills and interests. This is an actual message (identifying details redacted) that one of Piazza’s customers sent to a student, and all of his messages are similarly tailored. Not surprisingly, he has one of the most efficient outreach/close ratios I’ve ever seen.

Abby,

I really like your tag line "I believe in testing thoroughly, failing fast and releasing quickly. I like automation." We are building a startup in Menlo Park and using clojure. Today I was working on our continuous deployment pipeline. We deploy our services to Amazon ECS using convox.com. I've also been thinking a lot about best practices for keeping a stable master.I like the idea of a merge queue. Would be curious what your thoughts are there.

I'm reaching out because we are growing our engineering team at X Company [... ]

I have some availability Tuesday next week. I'd love to tell you more about what we are building if you are interested.

Jack

What makes this message so powerful?

  1. It comes from the hiring manager, and not a recruiter. Response rates to messages from hiring managers can be 2x higher than messages from recruiters.

  2. Jack clearly took the time to read Abby’s profile and tailor his message just to her, which immediately makes his message stand out from the generic outreach she’s used to getting. He also threw out an interesting technical challenge based on her experience that top engineers would be very intrigued to discuss further.

  3. The call to action is personal and specific. He’s willing to jump straight to a phone interview, rather than making a student come to his booth, take a coding test, or fill out an online job posting, which students see as a black hole from which they’ll never get a response.

Target great students for internships, and give them a great experience.

One of our software clients is renowned for building one of the top college recruiting brands in the country within a shockingly short time. Their secret? Laser target the top 1% of students at each campus, and relentlessly woo them by dazzling them with the brilliant people they’ll be working with and important projects they’ll be working on. They then deliver on that promise by providing a thoughtful and meaningful summer experience. A student’s worst nightmare is to spend the summer doing “intern projects.”

Instead, companies should ensure interns work on the same projects as full-time hires, while constantly connecting them to talented engineering mentors across the organization. When those students go back on campus, they become vocal advocates of the company, and their friends become your new crop of intern and full time candidates that you meet during your next campus visit.

Of course, not every company can and should hire only the top 1% of students, but the underlying principle stands - invest in your interns and it will pay dividends many times over.

Be specific about the type of impact they’ll have.

Recruiters now understand students care a whole lot about the impact they’ll have at a company, but it’s become such a standard part of a pitch that students are immune to it. To stand out, detail the specific projects that interns and new grads have worked on (or better yet, have one of those engineers explain their accomplishments in their own words either directly to students, or through blog posts or videos). Use this as a hook in your initial outreach, and make sure those same engineers join you on campus to share their experience in person. Your job as a recruiter is to facilitate a relationship between student candidates and your engineers. No one can inspire a student about the type of projects they’ll work on better than another engineer who was just in that student’s shoes.

What does this mean when you show up on campus? Rather than have 500 two-minute conversations with students that you’ve passively attracted to your booth, you’ll be having 50 twenty-minute conversations with students you’ve proactively chosen to meet. You and your engineering team will love this new model – we see customers increase their candidate meeting/close ratio by 10x, and they have a lot more fun in the process!

jessica gilmartinJessica Gilmartin is the former Chief Operating Officer of social learning and recruiting platform Piazza, which connects over 150 of the world's hottest technical employers with over a million of the world's top college students hailing from all major academic institutions, including all 50 of the top 50 US STEM programs. Previous to Piazza, she created and sold Fraiche Yogurt, a chain of gourmet yogurt stores that are now a San Francisco Bay Area institution, before going on to lead product marketing at Wildfire, a social media marketing startup acquired by Google. She holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.


Related articles:

The One Interview Question to Ask New Graduates
How to Keep Candidate Outreach Personal At Scale
Millennials vs. Baby Boomers: A Meaningless, Prideful Recruiter Deathmatch

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