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Employer Recruiting Strategies

By Don Malson
Retired as Director of the Grossnickle Career Services Center in 2014
Published Spring 2014, Affinity magazine

Employers use a full array of strategies to identify, engage and recruit talent. The basic group of strategies includes alumni connections, career fairs, campus information sessions and internships. The most active strategies used by organizations were career fairs (36 percent) and internships (58 percent). The most popular methods were posting job announcements in college employment systems (82 percent) and organization websites (68 percent). Here is a listing of many of the strategies:

• Posting positions on college employment systems
• Attending career fairs
• Posting positions on organization’s website
• Hiring from intern and co-op pool
• Visiting campuses for information sessions
• Using alumni from target campuses
• Posting positions with national web aggregators

Social media, an increasingly important strategy, still came in below the 48 percent mark.
Less than 50 percent used ads, consultants and state and local job boards.