A lot of organizations conduct campus recruitment drives to tap the young talent coming out of colleges and universities. The young blood are tomorrow’s leaders and form the backbone of many organizations who depend upon these minds to mould their future.
With dramatic increase in the number of colleges (engineering, pharma, computers, medical, MBA) of all kinds, it has become a challenge to identify good colleges and harness best talent. The problem is compounded by IT organizations attracting the best talent from non-IT fields too. The pressure of hiring within the budget is always in the minds of the HR champions who run the show.
Before we venture on how to reduce the campus recruitment costs, let us first identify the costs associated with campus recruitments.
1. Time of the recruiting organization: Depending upon the number of team members participating from your organization, calculate the amount of time being spent on various activities and convert them in currency.
2. Cost of building relationships with the colleges: A lot of organizations actively partner with the educational institutes and help them improve the quality of talent. The expenses should be attributed to campus recruitment cost.
3. Cost of Assessment: The cost of assessment includes the time and resources spent on building the question bank, ensuring effectiveness of the test, physically conducting the exam, verifying the test papers and conducting other activities like GDs, Interviews.
4. Cost of Resources, Travel and Accommodation: A team or multiple teams have to be sent out to conduct the campus recruitment drives. There are costs involved in engaging resources and managing their travel, accommodation and other expenses.
5. Cost of Data Processing : Once the drives are conducted, it is important to process data for various activities including extending job offers, analyzing performance of various colleges, followup with candidates, improving the quality of the question bank, and preparing for the next year.
6. The cost of ineffective filter : The biggest cost of campus recruitment is the cost of an ineffective filter. What if the paper based test that you use to filter candidates is rendered ineffective because of the process ineffectiveness. The manual process has numerous issues including paper leakage, using incorrect answer sheets, limited question sets giving opportunities of cheating etc. Every organization should look at tightening the nook and ensuring that the filter is effective.
The cost of talent acquisition should then be calculated on the basis of number of candidates joining the organization and NOT on the number of offers extended. Once this is done, ways should be looked at to reduce the cost from various points from the existing process. Also, you should aim to reduce the overall cost of talent acquisition rather than reducing the cost of campus drives ( its only one of the steps of talent acquisition).
Here are a few simple ways to reduce the cost of campus recruitment.
1. Know your Strengths : Every organization has a different strength and different requirements. Students that are best suited for one organization may not be a preferred choice for another. An organization should find its strength, identify its needs and this should be the basis of the college selection. Working under practical limitations is the best way of optimizing the cost of talent acquisition.
1. Home Work: It is important for an organization to find out which colleges to visit. The college selection should not depend upon the quality of infrastructure in the college, proximity of the college to your organization (same city) or the quality of hospitality you receive from the colleges. You should take into consideration the ranks of the students selecting the college at the time of admission, the quality of teachers that are present in the college, the lab quality, students’ participation in national level events that showcase their technical / management capabilities etc. One should also take into consideration one’s own requirements and fitment of candidates in the organization.
2. Planning : Once the target colleges are identified, the organization should look at building relationships with these colleges. This can be done through various means including a company’s participation in various educational activities, students / faculty training programs, inviting colleges for company visit, an ongoing training program for selected candidates etc. The schedule for the programs and resource commitments should be planned ahead of time.
3. Time it right : One of the important aspects of conducting successful campus drives is to time it right. Educational institutes have their curriculum and fixed calendar. The organization should look at reaching out to the candidates at the right time so that they can get access to this talent pool. It is a notion that organizations should only reach out to them when they want to recruit.
4. Offer Value : In this world of knowledge, most of the relationships are built on enriching everyone’s lives. When you reach out to candidates offer them the best value. A job is not measured only in terms of the salary offered but on multiple other factors like reason to work, a good workplace, growth opportunity, learning environment etc. Talent acquisition is a lot about selling your organization to the potential employees. Campus recruitment drives are an excellent opportunity to showcase what you have on offer.
5. Process Optimization : Scrutinize your campus recruitment process from the cost point of view. Assess where do you spend the maximum amount of time and money and how can that be reduced. Look out for partners who can take off your load and provide reliable services at reasonable cost. Outsource these activities and focus more on what you keep with yourself. Have appropriate checks and balances in place to ensure that you manage the quality.
6. Long Term Engagement: Long term engagements with educational institutes bring down the overall cost of recruitment. You can influence the quality of candidates coming out of those colleges and ensure that you get a preference over other organizations. It creates a win-win situation for both colleges as well the recruiting organizations.
7. Continuous Improvements : Let your data speak for you. Analysis should be performed after every recruitment cycle to look at ways of improving the quality of hires and reducing the cost of recruitment. This will help you in getting the best value for your money.
8. Improve Quality :As seen for most IT organizations, the candidates are assessed only on aptitude, reasoning and communication but not on programming. If you are recruiting programmers, why not assess them on programming skills ? Agreed, the quality does not come for free, but it definitely offsets the increased cost by a large margin thus giving you reduction in cost.
9. Reduce Data Management cost : Look at better ways of managing data generated with each recruitment cycle so that it can be an input for the next cycle. At the same time look at outsourcing this activity to the vendors if they offer a better solution at the right price. Ultimately the objective of data management should be to get useful information out of it to make the right decisions.Consider automating as many processes as possible to reduce the impact of manual intervention.
These tips come from firsthand experience of our team in managing campus drives for our customers. We see tremendous benefits gained from insights that an organization gets from analyzing right data at the right time. The talent acquisition cost reduces drastically over a period of time.
** EmployDEX Service Offerings **
EmployDEX offers skill assessment solutions for campus recruitment drives. We offer software based services for campus recruitments, question bank for IT, Automobile and Mechanical engineering companies. We also recommend colleges for conducting campus drives and we help build colleges long term engagements with various recruiting organizations. To know more about us, write to us at alok@employdex.com
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