3 Innovative Campus Recruitment Cases

Campus recruitment is an ever-competitive and fast-paced race to find the best candidates.

No strategy is a sure-fire in this race as recruiters adapt their approach to a dynamic generation. With recruiting tools like ATS, CRM, or SMS recruiting solutions, many businesses are developing innovative approaches to find suitable candidates.

For recruiting coordinators looking for a fresh approach, let see what innovative tricks businesses are using to reel in quality hires!

Innovative Campus Recruitment: X Case Studies

In this article, three companies of different sizes will show you how they transform their campus recruitment strategy with innovative changes to bring in qualified candidates!

National Grid US

“When our customers turn on their lights or gas stoves, National Grid Employees are the group of people responsible for making that happen.”

That’s the word of Valerie Rollo, Campus to Careers Manager at National Grid. The US branch is one of the biggest investor-owned energy companies providing safe and sustainable nature gas and electricity for the US population.

With 63% of the total 28,000 employees stationed in the US, this energy company’s campus recruitment strategy revolves around finding, attracting, and hiring young talent.

National Grid US and Campus Recruitment

National Grid usually recruits up to 250+ interns and over 100 recent graduates for entry-level openings. However, the global pandemic threatened National Grid’s effectiveness and ability to achieve the number.

National Grid recruiting team’s original strategy would involve approaching any career fair with print-out information and sign-up forms. At the same time, both recruiters and candidates had to jot down info with pen and paper.

This tedious process was made worse as compliance issues prevented recruiters from bringing paper resumes back to the office. The team’s overall efficiency before revamping their campus recruiting strategy left a lot to be desired. This was when Rakuna came in with a solution!

National Grid Innovative Campus Recruitment Strategy: Paperless Recruitment Using Rakuna’s Event App

National Grid is one of many big companies going against the stereotype that “Big companies can’t innovate.” It took less than three months for National Grid US to move from testing Rakuna’s Event App to implementing it to every recruiter attending career fairs across the US.

Rakuna’s recruiting event solution allows users to effortlessly retrieve candidates’ information on a resume with just a picture snap. This feat is achieved using Rakuna’s OCR technology, the “bread and butter” of our event app.

OCR technology also enables Rakuna’s later clients to recruit during and immediately after the global pandemic safely. Going paperless means less hassle managing paper resumes on-event and fewer points of contact for potential infection of the Covid-19 virus.

National Grid’s team also benefited from the automated Post-Event Messaging and Post-Event Survey. Recruiters can redirect candidates to the company’s career site, but even better is that these post-event processes are entirely automated. Those are just two of many features the Event App employs to support the National Grid recruiting team. The data produced by Rakuna’s extensive analytic suite also sheds light on event performance.

The Result

With National Grid, we will let the numbers do the talking. Within a year after implementing Rakuna’s event app, the recruiting team managed to:

• Cut down up to 60 hours of manual paperwork.
• Easily review post-event data and confidently use reliable ROI analytics to become more strategic in hiring people in the Energy industry.
• Since its implementation in 2017, National Grid has been receiving an increase of 10% in applicants every year.

Ashok Leyland

Ashok Leyland’s line of vehicle

Our second success case is Ashok Leyland - an Indian multinational automotive manufacturer. With over 11,463 employees by 2020, this Indian vehicle manufacturer is steadily revolutionizing Indian’s automotive industry.

Ashok Leyland is always eager to spread its’ engaging work culture - one that has helped the company win multiple awards.

Ashok Leyland and Their Campus Recruitment Challenges

Behind every innovative solution is a pain point that pushes companies to search for a solution. For the talent acquisition team at Ashok Leyland, campus recruitment was a struggle for several reasons:

Thanks to its overwhelmingly positive reputation, the business rarely experiences shortages in job applicants. However, the sheer number of applicants can cause technical and logistical problems. With the recruiting team stretched thin, recruiters lacked sufficient time to assess a candidate properly.

This situation was further exacerbated by the fact that the selection process was mostly done manually. The team lacks digital solutions to help boost time-to-hire and eliminate tedious tasks.

Ashok Leyland team’s previous candidate assessment process was also hindering recruiters. The team has established technical and aptitude tests. However, the assessment itself failed to properly analyze the candidates’ interpersonal and behavioral characteristics.

Their new campus strategy consists of two ultimate goals: arm their recruiters with better ìnformation through digital solutions while limiting cost, time, and effort.

Ashok Layland’s Innovative Campus Recruitment Strategy: Game-Based Assessment

With clear goals in mind, the recruitment team began adding assessment methods to enhance their candidate assessment process. One of them is a game-based method called NAUTICS, developed and distributed by Talent Litmus.

NAUTICS introduces challenges and problems to candidates through a role-playing system. The game will put students in different scenarios with multiple problems. The candidates will then utilize their leadership, problem-solving, and other interpersonal skills to overcome each obstacle.

What’s more, recruiters can execute NAUTICS through their chosen recruitment platform, making the user experience seamless and straightforward. The team at Ashok Leyland then receives an assessment table detailing each candidate’s performance. Talent Litmus - the creator of NAUTICS, also provides the Indian automotive company with a competency framework to analyze the result.

The Result

The positive reception of the ‘NAUTICS’ experience

With additional data provided by NAUTICS, recruiters can now better assess their candidates under fewer interviews and shorter intervals. Up to 76% of candidates chosen through the NAUTICS game are listed as ‘likely to succeed’ - a much higher result than the team’s original technical test (66%). NAUTICS also lets candidates experience a more liberating assessment experience, an experience that up to 97% of students said is one of the best tests they have ever taken.

By forgoing the traditional test process and adopting NAUTICS, Ashok Layland’s team gave their recruitment program a massive boost. Not only did the students respond positively to the game format of the assessment, being able to apply their skills in an engaging situation provided by the test.

Mettl‘s client

While this particular client remained unnamed, Mettl - a talent assessment company, part of the Mercer consulting firm, still gives us a clear picture of how it helped this client transform their campus recruitment process.

Mettl’s client for this success story is an American enterprise, described by Mettl as one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies. The business is now the platform for a massive amount of international online transactions.

Mettl’s Client and Campus Recruitment

The client has always wanted to scale the impact of their diversity and inclusion strategy and recruit a diverse workforce. They came to Mettl with the request to help them enroll more women in tech roles. Having listened to the client’s request, Mettl quickly devised a large-scale campus recruitment event plan to bring in qualified candidates in leading technology institutions across India.

Mettl’s Client Innovative Campus Recruitment Strategy: Online Hackathon Contest

Rakuna has always been an avid supporter of Hackathon events. As a recruitment tool, this competition allows recruiters to thoroughly test the abilities of their candidates by:

• Provide real-time problems and challenges to identify problem-solvers and creative thinkers.
• Provide real insights into existing problems for candidates.
• Streamline your business’s presence by hooking attention using a competitive event.

With Mettl’s fully online Hackathon platform, the client now has the chance to reduce the potential fees to host a physical event, lesser logistic efforts, and more time to improve its campus recruiting strategy.

So how exactly did Mettl execute this program?

Mettl’s first mission was to create a buzz surrounding the competition. The team created a landing page on their Hackathon platform, social media sites, and direct campus connections to start reeling in applicants. Mettl even pushed the marketing campaign during International Women’s Day to help its message reach the intended audience.

While the client’s Hackathon contest was conducted like any other physical counterpart, hosting a competition on a dedicated platform has its perks:

• Along with judges’ assessments, the recruitment team also has access to auto- score grading features and reports with detailed analytics generated by the platform.
• Users can use multiple security and proctoring features like facial recognition and a secure browser that prevents opening cheat websites to ensure fair competition.

The Result

A tremendous success for Mettl’s client is that they digitized their campus recruitment strategy without sacrificing the visitor experience. With a highly responsive Hackathon platform and engaging landing page, the e-commerce company attracted 6500 female students to join the competition.

The client also benefited from a robust analytics feature that provides insights regarding candidates’ problem-solving skills and other noteworthy attributes.

Conclusion

The nature of campus recruiting always drives modern recruiters to search for new and innovative strategies to approach young candidates. We hope by learning from three distinctive businesses, your business, too, can start recruiting the next generation of talent!

If you want to make a breakthrough in campus recruitment like National Grid, contact Rakuna today to see how our Campus Recruiting Suite can help you!

Vector images provided by Freepik