Is campus recruiting different from other types of high volume?

[00:00:12] Welcome to episode 83 of the High Volume Hiring Podcast. I am one of your two co-hosts. I'm Stephen Rothberg and I'm the founder of College Recruiter Job Search Site, where we believe that every student and recent grad deserves a great career and that it should be easy and inexpensive for employers to hire them.

[00:00:31] As is usual, I am joined here today by Wonder Woman. Oh, for those who aren't on video, my co-host Jeanette Leeds has an awesome drawing of Wonder Woman behind her, which is what she knows. Thank you. Hi everyone, Jeanette Leeds, HR tech entrepreneur. Been in, my goodness, I was thinking about this other day, the space for almost 25 years now.

[00:00:52] And I'm really, really happy to have Simon Coe with us today. He is the head of early careers and development for Raymond James. And so as some of the listeners know, I started my career in recruiting, in-campus recruiting, as we call it, at Lehman Brothers way, way, way, way back in the day. So I'm super excited today to talk about not just high volume, but how campus recruiting is, in my view, I've said this for years, is high volume recruiting. So Simon, welcome.

[00:01:20] So this is going to be a gladiator match between the two of you. Is that, is that worth? Well, I, if we're going to compete for oldest, oldest recruiter, I think I got her beat. So. Ooh, I don't know. I've been watching Younger lately on, it's now on Netflix. So I'm just saying like, you know, someone might be appearing younger. Well done you. Thanks.

[00:01:44] Awesome. Well, Simon, I know, you know, not just working for Raymond James, but you've been involved as a board member on NACE, for those that don't know, National Association of Colleges Employers. You've been a lot of other large enterprises running, I always say campus recruiting, but early careers and that.

[00:02:01] So maybe, you know, we know many, many of our listeners know, but not everyone knows how complex that can be and the volume. So maybe you could just like, give us a quick like overview of why, you know, campus early recruiting is truly high volume. And not to take away from any of your listeners, right? I think all of our jobs are hard, right? Our hiring managers just assume like, oh, you know, swing a cat, find us a candidate. Right.

[00:02:28] But the truth is, I think in college recruiting, I think some of the complexities, the fact that there's just so many college students. And I think, especially now with recruiting technology, the way it is, there's a phrase that I've been hearing more and more. It's called the application avalanche that we are seeing so many students. So think about like those of you who have children going to college, right? The average of average high school seniors applying to 14 to 16 colleges. And how did they make that selection? Well, think about how many employers are out there.

[00:02:56] So your average university student, how many are they applying to? And I think it's easily double digit because they can apply to so many different places. Beyond that, I think what makes kind of the volume challenging is we have complexity by location, by profile or segment. So even a company like Raymond James, you know, you may know us best for financial advising, but no one's hiring a 21 year old financial advisor. You know, we're actually hiring investment banking, information technology, analytics, right?

[00:03:26] Global wealth solution. So we are sourcing for all these different kind of populations. And we have kind of floods of candidates that don't really even know what they're applying for. So I think that there's so much upfront work that we're doing, not just hiring, not just managing volumes, but then managing the education engagement of candidates. So I think that that's a complexity of college recruiting. Then on the back end, we're hiring them one to two semesters before they actually even join us.

[00:03:54] So how do we continue to engage them before they go somewhere else or wait, my dream job just popped up? You know, so this is a very different kind of candidate life cycle in the college university world. So Simon, I am so glad that you touched on the, we are hiring them one to two semesters before they graduate kind of thing. And if I can take that a step further, that's just for the, like the seniors, like those who are finishing school.

[00:04:19] And the same kind of thing applies for like the juniors that might be looking for say an internship or for our listeners abroad third year. Or she's is in the U S is what we call juniors, fourth year seniors.

[00:04:33] What that's to me, a massive difference between high volume hiring for students and recent grads, early career versus warehouse logistics, drivers, call centers, hospitality. I want to speak sort of in general about financial services or organizations like Raymond James that do a ton of campus recruiting.

[00:04:58] What do you do when you're extending an offer to somebody in say November, and you know, she's not going to show up until June. What do you do to help ensure that she actually does show up? So the job of the recruiter has changed, right? You have to have that connection and relationship, right? Cause the transaction recruiting great. We got her to accept your, your candidate, right? We got her to accept. And then we can't go radio silent, right? For the next six, seven months.

[00:05:26] So you should see the communication strategies, the follow-up strategies, the event strategies, the gift giving strategies. Like, so it's a keep warm strategies that we talk about. What I have said to my, my team, for example, as I said, the more successful we are in cultivating the relationship upfront, the easier it is to keep them in the mix. But what you're going to hear from every company is the reneg rate is, is increasing because unfortunately we've been using technology to manage the volumes. Right.

[00:05:54] So, you know, whether you're doing kind of, you know, higher view interviews or you're doing kind of online assessments and things like that, the recruiting process has started to become more, is already less personal than it used to be back in the day. Like, Jeanette, back in our day, right? Yes, yes, yes. Like, we didn't have to get her back in our day. But, yeah, but the downfall of that is we don't have the relationship. And so this is where the recruiting role has changed in terms of thinking, where are you spending your time to cultivate that candidate?

[00:06:23] But by the time they become an applicant or by the time they become a hire, we already have a head start in that relationship. But the fact is that there is that risk that they are continuing to interview, you know, in the seven months remaining. Yeah. Hey, this is Brent Skinner, host of Small Talk Window here at the Work Defined Podcasting Network. Have you ever wanted a short podcast to listen to during a coffee break of your work day? You've come to the right place.

[00:06:50] My guests dispense with a small talk as quickly as possible and settle into a meaningful conversation around the world of work. You talk about, you know, I feel like for typical recruiting, you know, the time to hire, you know, it's like not even a KPI for campus early career. I mean, it's just totally, it's like almost a time to accept and whatnot. So I think that's such an interesting difference.

[00:07:15] Talking about relationships, one thing that always was, I don't want to say a pain point, but a big difference, but you have to deal with it from a volume standpoint, is referrals. And you touched that. I know, I know. But I want to go here because I think it's a really, really interesting. It's like a big pain point in your early careers. Because as you said, everyone knows college students. Everyone. Right? And so referrals, and I don't want to say regular, high volume, great. Who do you know?

[00:07:45] Great. Let's get them in. Refer people, refer people. Like years ago, I remember running what effectively was like the referral program. I wouldn't even say where. And it was, you know, there's a few gray hairs because of it. But it's an engagement part, right? So maybe talk a bit about that, like how you handle that at scale. Because I think that could be interesting. I don't know a recruiting leader who loves referrals. You know, so. It's interesting.

[00:08:15] Outside of early careers, referrals are gold. 25 to 30% of your hiring in the experience world, right? You love it. Yeah. Experience. I like that. The challenge on the campus side is, yes, there are so many college students. Everyone knows someone, right? And so I still think that referrals are really important to our process. But it's about when you are referring a candidate. The later in the process, right, full time, and kind of Steve, you alluded to that, right?

[00:08:40] Like most organizations, if they really have a mature campus recruiting model, are really focused on the intern population. Because intern is your yield of full time. But so think about referrals. If you're being referred a student as a senior, right, you have very few spots remaining. And so that's really high pressure around that. Then even as interns, it's so competitive. So really, Jeanette, like what I've started doing at this company, I've seen other companies

[00:09:09] more successfully do this as well, is how do we get them earlier in the pipeline? So we start broadcasting to our associates, bring us your freshmen and your sophomores. Because we have enough programs for them to learn, to engage, to actually understand the jobs like at Raymond James. And I can say this because this isn't a trade secret. We have like 35 profiles that you can apply to. And so how do we help you figure out what actually makes sense instead of just getting the intern or getting the full time offer?

[00:09:35] How do we help you figure out what actually makes sense so that we get you into our talent, like our talent community first? That's the best way to get a referral in. Right. Because then you're still kind of treating everyone objectively because, and people know this, especially in the US, right? We have very strict Department of Labor, EEOC laws. As a financial services institution, we have anti-bribery, anti-corruption policies and how a referral is classified, right?

[00:10:05] So we have to be careful about how we manage them. But at the end of the day, it's the relationship. We don't want to damage a relationship with an associate, with a client, but to be fair in our hiring practices, give them to us earlier. So we've really been on a campaign to say, if you get referrals into our pipeline earlier, we can manage them, educate them, give them the opportunity, but also assess them fairly. I think we've all heard the expression, the three R's when it comes to education, reading, writing, and somehow arithmetic. Arithmetic.

[00:10:34] It's like, okay, one of those has an R, I think. We'll catch that for you. Exactly. I'm going to have to go to chat GPT and ask how that came about. But anyway, I heard a speaker years ago. I think it was Julie Cunningham, who was then at Tell Labs delivering a presentation on internship programs. And what she talked about was like the three R's of a successful internship program, recruiting, recruiting, recruiting, which I thought was brilliant.

[00:11:03] So talk with us about, not just for Raymond James, but for any employer that's doing college and university recruiting, the importance of the internship program into that pipeline. So I've worked across multiple industries, multiple companies, and it's all the same in that the data will show you that former interns that accept full-time perform better because they're more confident, they have more experience,

[00:11:32] stay longer because they're more culturally aligned, which that should be what we all want. And especially because attrition is getting, you know, kind of increasing and, you know, we're lucky to get a college hire to say two years these days. Right. Right. But former interns, if that's the yield, then the internship really is an important pipeline because it's basically the test drive. We're testing them out. They're testing us out.

[00:11:52] The challenge, and maybe I'll take this in a slightly different direction, that has become a responsibility of the recruiters working alongside maybe our HR partners, our talent consulting partners, is what's the headcount? So I always tell the story that I have an executive, different company, that used to always joke and I could see the panic in his eyes when I would come into his office. I'm like, so, you know, the conversation we need to have. He's like, workforce plan, huh? I'm like, yep. What do you need five years from now? He said, what do you mean? I said, and I'll use this year as the example.

[00:12:23] We're about to start recruiting the interim class of 2026, right? Because we're way too close to the summer of 2025. That means that it's your full-time class of 2027. If they go through a two-year development program, that's 2029, right? 26, 27, 29. So how many do you need coming out of our analyst program? What skills do they need to have, right? And he's like, I can barely figure out next year, right? Next quarter, right?

[00:12:49] So, but this is the college, like we're a midterm talent solution, but we're trying to help the business think longer term. But all of a sudden, the recruiter is not just transactional. Like you're now actually trying to be a strategist with the business. And just as a follow-up question too, I hear this number from your work with NACE. I think you would probably know this and tell me, no, Stephen, I don't know what you're smoking, but the actual number is blank.

[00:13:13] But I've heard that on average, about 75% of interns will receive an offer for quote-unquote permanent employment. And that about half of those will accept. So it's more or less in the 40% range of your interns will come to you after graduation. You just being employers in general. Is that sound about right? Or have you seen different numbers?

[00:13:43] So I think the number I'm thinking about, which is kind of the outcome of what you're saying, is the conversion number. So conversion is how many of your interns end up joining full-time. So that takes into account offers and acceptances. Because I think people define conversion a little bit differently at every company. But I think you said it right, which is what's the offer rate? What's the acceptance rate? The conversion rate, I believe that I saw on NACE. And so I'm sure someone in NACE is going to call me out on this. I believe the national in the U.S. is about 65% is the target of conversion.

[00:14:13] I actually think most companies expect it to be higher, right? So I think about professional services like the big four accounting firms. I think they are closer to 80% to 90% conversion. If we're investing in the intern population, giving them the right experience, giving them training, giving them full opportunity. And students are expecting that now as well, right? Is that they expect the summer internship is no longer just a fun job to try out a career. It really is that pipeline to full-time.

[00:14:39] So I think that that's an important conversation to have with your leaders to say, if we're going to bring a summer intern in and give them the experience, this impacts our brand. This impacts our quality of hire. What's that number that we want to get to with offer and ultimately acceptance and conversion rate? I think that we should be targeting, and we're trying to be in the 80% range. That makes sense. And again, the KPIs, these numbers, they're so specific to this type of recruiting. Okay. I'm looking at the time.

[00:15:09] I feel like we don't have time for a question, but I'm going to just ask one. I'm going to do a quick, quick, quick one. A quick one. Okay. Okay. Just quick advice because campus, as you said, early careers, it's so much on relationships. And I think the power of campus in harnessing the internal relationships to become recruiting. Any quick tip for companies listening that maybe aren't involved in campus, but how they can translate that? Quick tip, quick tip. Yeah.

[00:15:33] Quick tip is to think about how you engage the business because it's easy to say we'll hire interns, but if the business isn't aligned and doesn't understand the output of it, then it's not worth running a program like that because it is a massive investment to do because your interns aren't immediate hires. And then even your college hires still need to be trained up.

[00:15:56] And so I think the proposition, that's why we switched from campus recruiting to early careers because there's also development as well. So I think that the opportunity for anyone in HR and recruiting is how do we become better business strategists and actually talk with our business and say, what do you need? And how do we fill your business need and understand the talent agenda through campus recruiting? I love it. Simon, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. I know our listeners are going to love this one.

[00:16:26] Steven, always a pleasure. Thank you, Jeanette. Simon, thank you so much. All right. Take care. Take care.