The recruitment conundrum: How to scale higher ed culture to your growing digital brand
Your school is special. Period. You know this and, as a recruiter, a big part of your job is selling this dream to prospect students. In the past, this involved organizing campus tours rich with ivy-colored stone buildings, book-filled library stacks and sports fields buzzing with collegiate potential.
But our digital world has expanded your recruitment frontiers beyond the physical campus – and your prospective students are changing with it. You need to integrate your higher ed culture into your digital brand to ensure you get the right eyes on your school.
Gen Z demands authentic engagement at every recruitment step
As the first generation of pure digital natives, Gen Z has never been without the world at their fingertips. For higher ed recruiters, this has affected the way they expect to be interacted with. But their demands remain the same: to feel wanted, special and brimming with good vibes.
Related: The melt dilemma: what are Gen Z’s doubts all about?
A recent survey of Gen Z respondents, for example, found that traditional higher ed recruitment push methods, like unpersonalized mass emails or sending printed materials via snail mail, ranked among the most ineffective outreach methods. The same survey data showed in-person meetings as the most-valuable to Gen Z in terms of projecting authenticity. The challenge becomes digitizing this personalized authenticity and scaling to massive audiences.
Scaling personalization is possible with the right digital tools
From social media to email to something as personal as a phone call, there is no shortage of options for digital person-to-person communication. But how do you scale the experience, personalization and control of one-to-one interactions to thousands of recipients? Both ends of this spectrum have their challenges and shortcomings.
When it comes to pushing higher ed culture, for example, social media is an obvious contender on account of its reach and community look-and-feel (and is a place where Unibuddy data tells us 55% of your prospects go for higher ed information). But social media is unpredictable, doesn’t provide you the insights you need and opens your marketing materials, something Gen Z interprets as advertising, to influencer competition, a group of peers Gen Z view as authentic and personal.
Related: How to choose the best university chat app: 4 steps
Unibuddy fuses the best of both these worlds by connecting prospective students with staff and student ambassadors via a digital peer-to-peer, student-to-student, platform. Through Unibuddy, your recruitment team can cast a massive international net, utilizing both push and pull technology, to start real conversations with real prospect students – ensuring your higher ed recruitment efforts are as much pathos as they are logos.
Learn more about our line of authentic engagement solutions.
Pre-arrival community inclusion boosts retention rates
Your campus tour is a huge part of your bid to showcase your higher ed culture. But perhaps you might be overlooking an even more valuable resource available right at your fingertips: your students. In addition to forming the fabric of what makes your higher ed special, your students are also your biggest brand advocates.
Related: Want a proven way to engage Gen Z? The magic is in belonging
Through edtech student-to-student solutions, like Unibuddy Community, you can introduce prospective students to their student body before they set foot on campus – assuring a sense of warm belonging throughout their admissions process. They can also take this opportunity to ask questions to student ambassadors, made up of peers they trust, who have walked in their shoes before, to ensure they arrive confident they made the right choice.
Digital scaling starts with what’s under the hood
At the end of the day, scaling to digital demands comes down to a simple question: do you have the IT resources to run it all? Probably not. In addition to eating up time and limited resources, attempting to do it all yourself can have an ironic detrimental effect on your ability to scale your digital recruitment efforts.
To help offload this digital burden, enabling you to focus on more important things (like actual recruitment), look for third-party edtech software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions which provide the tools you need without required overhead. Plug-and-play SaaS solutions, like Unibuddy, can be easily integrated with your existing recruitment efforts, both push and pull, with the added benefit of providing valuable insights and control over these processes. Updates, new features, help desk queries and other time- and resource-consuming headaches are all taken care of before they reach your desk.
