11 HR tools to organise your campus recruiting

As for employers, they invest more and more into long-term and more qualitative relationships with the young generation, rather than treating interns as something seasonal, (for example, PepsiCo's Break Out program is aimed at attracting talent to build a promising database of future leaders for 7 years ahead). Companies tend to assess skills rather than particular schools and focus on competences, rather than just GPAs.

Among the challenges an employer faces, planning an internship is finding a star among the heaps of applications, ensuring fair assessment for all and keeping an attractive employer brand. All of this is, of course, keeping in mind the interests of the youngsters: they want to go through a smooth, digital, cool hiring process and feel they are valued during each step when interacting with the employer.

That's why to make the most of campus recruiting nowadays, a company needs to refine its campus hiring, blend technologies, automation and human interaction and deliver the mix to reach out to HiPo campus talent and build a productive talent pipeline. Let's talk about how to boost your campus recruiting toolbox.

The borders of the young talent market search are widening: from career fairs, hackathons and workshops offline in a particular area, we have moved to the online world with literally no borders. As Handshake reports, the number of students who visited virtual events jumped by 50% just March 2020 compared with February 2020. So the search you do as an employer if you want to stay ahead of the campus hiring game is also about going online. LinkedIn is one of the most productive candidate sourcing platforms. When we launched an international internship in 2020, we attracted around 100 applications each day.

Other effective tools to attract young talent were publishing our internship page on jobs boards, such as Indeed, and sending out university emails. To reach out to the grads and present ourselves and our DNA, we created an eye-catching internship page (spending 20 minutes on it) and sent it out on the platforms. This helped us to lay the first bricks of our employer brand image in the eyes of our future interns. The other crucial thing for future data-based decisions is defining which candidate source is most effective, and this is what VCV's platform also allows you to do. ZipRecruiter and Career Builder are also options for the student search. The 2020 Job Seeker Nation Report states that 49% of all surveyed job candidates under age 40 are looking for jobs via social media. You know what to do!

Candidates' resumes might look the same, and a good GPA doesn't equal good performance. What are the ways for an extra surface assessment? Of course, you can contact the university or go with Checkr, to make sure the person is really studying in a particular place. But we are talking about basic, though possibly crucial for you, questions such as when a person is ready to start the internship, whether they have a necessary level of a particular foreign language, or whether they are ready for a completely remote internship format.

Sure, you could use a Google-form and connect it with your further assessment stages with the help of, say, Zapier, but what if you could do it in one window? This is what our application forms are about (of course, they can be used separately as well, if you want). As part of a hiring pipeline, they automatically reject those who don't meet the basic criteria and at the next stage, you meet only those who successfully passed the first stage. Ask any question, from one-choice/multiple-choice to open ones; ask to attach a file, and pave the way to a smooth automated selection.

Fresh college graduates or students hardly have any work experience and it's difficult to estimate their skills just by judging their resumes. That's why pre-employment tests become a crucial part of the campus hiring pipeline.

Managing these assessments online are a way to reduce costs and save both your and the candidate's time. Whether you are turning to gamification in assessment or use platforms like Evalground, Eskill or TestGorilla, or work with company-drawn tests, you might want to have it all in one place and smoothly integrated with your whole hiring pipeline. That's when VCV's test-builder steps in: EQ, IQ, cognitive, aptitude, skills, personality tests, and any other test you want are smoothly integrated and the results are protected by our anti-cheating tools, from copy-paste protection to frame-to-frame shooting (of course, with the candidate's agreement).

Getting to know a candidate face-to-face without a personal meeting is not something from science fiction these days. It's here and it saves on costs and time, and boosts your employer brand for youngsters. We're talking about an on-demand video interview or a pre-recorded video interview. Basically, five minutes of such an interview can replace a 1-hour Zoom interview. It works like this: you make a list of questions, share the link with a candidate or integrate this stage into your hiring pipeline and get video answers which you can watch any time and place. Pre-recorded video interviews surely bring you closer to Millennials and Gen Z. To build a connection with the candidate from the first virtual meeting, you can record a video about your company and present yourself or just record your questions, just as PepsiCo did for their acceleration program.

For example, this video question not only helps a candidate to meet a team member, but also helps the company to find out more about the applicant.