Dear VP of Talent at Fortune 500 Company
Dear VP of Talent at Fortune 500 Company,
You are the head of talent for one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. You are successful. You are smart. You have influence. You have earned your current role from hard work. And, if you are like the talent leaders I speak with, you have 2 big questions you are asking right now about undergraduate recruitment:
What do I do with my internal team who traveled to campuses all over the country to engage with prospective candidates?
How do I access top talent when I cannot board the plane to go physically meet them?
These are good questions and the reason I am writing to you. But first, my question is… where did you go to college?
Now hold that thought and take a moment to think about the 10 most impressive colleagues you work with…where did they go to college?
Here is my list:
University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Central Michigan University, University of Washington, Cal Poly-SLO, James Madison University, Cornell University, Texas A&M, University of Arizona, UC-Santa Barbara
Now I would guess that today, your company does not recruit at all these schools. They are good schools, but they are pretty different by geography and ranking and your company probably has opinions about how you match to these schools or not. But an individual from each of these schools works with me right now at Handshake in San Francisco and they are 10 of the most impressive people at my company by intelligence, leadership, impact, work ethic, and teamwork. Do these people sound like employees you might want at your company?
I went to Stanford University and I believe that I benefited from the current school list system. I did work hard and I did push myself to earn my current seat at the table. But these 10 people I work with are more impressive than me. I acknowledge that the university we attended does say something about us — how hard we worked or how we prioritized or the opportunity we were given or what we did with that opportunity or how well we performed on tests. That said, I work alongside plenty of impressive people from schools that do not have an “elite” brand. Let’s add your 10 most impressive colleagues school list to mine — and if you and I both believe that there are amazing people who went to all the schools we noted, then we can pause to reflect and make the bold statement:
There are smart and qualified students for the roles you recruit for at most colleges, not just the ones you recruit at today.
Being the VP of Talent, I know you spend a bit of time thinking about your early talent hires — those from universities or in their first few years out of school. Based on conversations I have regularly with your peers, I would guess that you want them to be a reflection of your brand and that you want them to display a diversity of backgrounds and experiences and that you want them to be high achievers. So how do you attract this talent to work for you?
There are 2,400 four year colleges in the US. Traditionally, companies have built core school lists as the foundation for their university recruiting strategy. These are the colleges where companies make their open roles visible and where they will go on campus to host events and recruit talent. A company needs to hire a certain number of new college graduates every year — they are the future after all. Companies often also need to fill an internship class that they hope will decrease their need to recruit again for seniors because they got early employment commitments from juniors at the end of their internships. In order to attract top talent to a company, the common first question is, “where do the most qualified candidates for our open job roles go to college?” The common first solution is, “Let’s go there and meet them!”
Welcome to 2020. You are not getting on that plane right now for sure and the chance that you get to share coffee with all your future employees who are about to go back to school in the fall is off the table.
When we think about the best companies in the world, like you, they have large hiring targets. I work with 15 of the top Fortune 500 companies in my job — the smallest hires about 200 early talent each year — the largest more than 10,000. The model for recruiting early talent has a few different structures, but it tends to be a variation of this:
You have a university talent team. This team is in charge of university relationships. The individuals on this team are university relationship managers who cover 5–10 of your core schools. In some versions of this model they are on campus at those schools often. They are your “boots on the ground” and they do a lot of the logistics and management around events. At these events you typically fly in business representatives to meet with prospective candidates. In some versions of this model, your university relationship managers do not go on campus, but they organize all the engagement with the campuses for others to go. Regardless of their airline miles, they are primarily tasked with getting you a lot of resumes from their school list and this has a heavy, and sometimes exclusive, focus on being physically present at the school.
There are many inefficiencies in this structure, but today I will focus on the fact that companies like yours have somewhere between 3 to 150 of these university relationship managers and that’s a bunch of people with no plane to board.
You know the recruiting industry better than me — but just in case a fresh perspective is interesting, here is my humble suggestion for a new way you could structure your team for the current socially distanced scenario and possibly beyond.
Our opportunity for Fall 2020 is to flip the order of operations in early talent recruitment:
Start with the talent profile, not the school.
Then reorganize your team to map to the talent profiles you need, not the schools where you typically go on campus.
We HAVE to do something about this now because we cannot sit on campus and collect resumes. But my hope is that this is not a short term change. Right now our model of recruitment at a select handful of schools creates an inequitable system for talent that hurts the students, but also, your company. It limits your ability to reach the complete “best” candidate cohort. Making jobs viewable only to a small group of schools and only interviewing students at a handful of campuses was an efficient strategy when there were not other options. Now this virtual and digital reality is forcing the door of these old ways closed, and the door of opportunity for a more equitable and successful future to open and thrive.
There is a way to make your team more efficient with your money and time. A way to make students who are qualified for jobs get more of an equal playing field to access them. And a way for you as the employer to truly get the top talent nationally instead of just the top students at a small handful of colleges. I know you love your core school list and this is uncomfortable already, but stay with me.
This “way” starts with looking at early talent through a national lens.
First, build “talent profiles” with skills you want your applicants to have for different roles. Then bring your current university recruiting managers into a centralized digital sourcing team where they individually cover specific talent profiles. Task them with creating groups of students who meet these criteria the business is asking for. Give them access to the biggest network for early talent in the US — Handshake— so that they can find the qualified candidates that have historically not engaged with your company. Get them out of your stale CRM data and instead doing what they do best — identifying new qualified talent.
Second, once they have created groups of qualified candidates (“segments”), task them with driving applications to your open roles through proactive, personalized, and scalable communication. Send messages to these students directly about why they are qualified and why you think they should work at your great company. Connect with them directly through their .edu email addresses so you get the best possible engagement back from these qualified candidates. Week over week, track your university team’s progress with different profiles and make adjustments from data driven results that highlight what is and is not working. With this strategy you will get more pre-qualified applicants than you thought possible, in way less time, without spending on a single plane ticket. This is my answer to: “What do I do with my internal team who traveled to campuses all over the country to engage with prospective candidates?” and “How do I access top talent when I cannot board the plane to go physically meet them?”
This might sound like a dramatic change. Great companies like yours might only recruit at “elite” schools because you are the coolest company you have ever heard of and you are super unique and you only want the best students in America. Great! I’ve met a few of you. But you do actually want to reach the best students in America, right? Well, you’re in luck, because you can do that. Here is an example of what I mean:
Example: I need juniors who are top achievers. I want them to have a 3.8 GPA, be a computer science major, want to live in Twin Cities, Minnesota, oh, and I want them to know Python and C++… ok, great.
I just identified 371 students that meet your exact criteria.
Do you ACTUALLY care where they go to school if they meet your exact criteria? Think about your 10 most impressive colleagues…
Instead of recruiting from and automatically going to the campuses in your core school list because you have always gone there, your CEO went there, or last year you had the most hires from there, for the first step — let’s just find and tell all the best students who are qualified that they are qualified and that we would like them to apply. It takes less than 10 minutes and requires no expense report to be filed. Compare that to the cost of the flights and the branded tablecloths and the swag, plus the opportunity cost of the 40 hours from 5 people in the business who are there instead of contributing to the bottom line of your company. This adds up to a few thousand dollars typically for just one trip to campus.
This fall, for the first time ever, you are not limited by time or money to reach top talent.
One important note: I am not saying that all schools are equally good places to spend your recruiting resources. There will be a higher volume of qualified applicants at some schools versus others and those should receive investment. But why would we overlook a qualified candidate if they have the potential to be your best hire and it is easy to reach them? That is what I am encouraging us to reconsider and reorganize around.
Are you saying we shouldn’t go on campus!?!??! Blasphemy.
No, I am not saying that!
Right now, you can’t, so there’s that. But when that changes, you should go on campus and you should invest resources to create a personalized and real candidate experience with your brand. But that should be the second step, when you want to increase your competitive advantage for a group of highly qualified individuals. Students want to meet you — do not stop meeting them. But also, wouldn’t you hate to know that actually the best future CEO of your company went to Michigan Tech (like mine)… and you never even posted your job at the school so now they’re the CEO of your competitor 10 years later?
This fall is going to be different… It doesn’t make sense to virtually do the same info session 50 times for students at 50 schools when you aren’t on campus at any of them, so reach everyone qualified at the same time. You don’t have to think about buying a t-shirt or dinner for every student you meet and worry about costs, so reach everyone qualified at the same time. Digital communication channels do not have geography limits or layovers, so reach everyone qualified at the same time.
Let’s start with the skills we want in our future employees instead of our biases towards college logos that can perpetuate inequalities and signify more about a student’s past than their future with you. This change can be efficient, powerful, democratic, effective, and save you millions of dollars. It isn’t everyday something that great comes around, especially during a global pandemic.
Let’s go find your future CEO — wherever they are.
Thank you,
Katie
