Always Be Recruiting: Building an Intern Pipeline
Most of you know Alec Baldwin’s famous speech in Glengarry Glen Ross where he shares the golden rule of sales: “ABC: Always Be Closing.”
Even more so than sales, recruiting is a job where you need to be always on. If you’re not building a pipeline of candidates and promoting your brand, chances are that the rock star candidate you want to hire will slip through the cracks.
The same philosophy is true in the campus-recruiting world when hiring interns. The biggest companies with the deepest pockets (Microsoft for example) have massive university teams that make sure that no potential candidate is left unturned. In fact, Microsoft is so dedicated to the idea of always recruiting interns that they have a college recruiter responsible for every technical university in the country! At key campuses like University Illinois Urbana Champagne Microsoft is regularly on campus meeting with student groups and even taking them out to get free ice cream.
The question is if you’re company and budget is smaller than the big M’s (which it almost undoubtedly is)– how do you keep up?
Here are some key ways you can always be recruiting and make sure you stay competitive when hiring students:
1.) Create an always up online presence
Whether you have a careers page that promotes your internship program or you use an Intern Campus Hub on InternMatch, you should always have a place online where a student can learn about your internship program and submit a resume. Students now a days are google searching their trig homework so you better believe they are searching for your program online – having a strong online presence means you are putting your best foot forward no matter when a student learns about you!
2.) Visit Campus Off Season
This may seem counter-intuitive in terms of a low budget recruiting solution, but there is nothing students love more than getting a summer internship early. Most students are happy to accept summer offers in the fall, because it means they get to kick back and relax the rest of the year. Companies like Nestl
