We've put together the 8 most important questions every recruiting team should be asking right now. Are YOU asking these questions?

1. 2015
The 8 Questions Every Recruiting Team Should Ask

2. Question #1: Am I visiting the right schools?
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3. Answer: If you’re not measuring, you won’t know.
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Too few employers have a strategic and effective target school strategy.
Their decisions are often based on internal politics, habit, or completely at
random. They wind up wasting precious time, manpower, and money by
visiting schools that don’t yield results.
Target School
Dashboard
Target School
Strategy Development
Universum resources available to help:
Understand how your performance
at target schools differs.
Develop a data-driven target school
strategy to know which campuses
are best for you.
How top employers address this:
Understand the nuances of different schools, and use a data-driven approach to
select where they should and shouldn’t visit.

4. Question #2: Are all of our recruiters sharing a unified
message?
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5. Answer: Sharing stories about the right things is
complicated.
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Even companies with some of the most robust communication strategies
struggle to communicate these ideas on a day-to-day level. Quite simply, big
ideas are often tough to translate into real stories that resonate – and that
means that candidates who speak to different recruiters can receive different
messages.
Activation
Cards
Universum resources available to help:
Equip your recruiters to know
what and how to communicate
with potential candidates
on campus.
How top employers address this:
On top of creating an EVP, the best employers equip their recruiters to talk
about these things in a consistent and approachable way.

6. Question #3: What do candidates want to hear about
most?
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7. Answer: It depends on who your target candidates are!
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In an effort to appeal to as broad of a talent base as possible, many
companies try to communicate everything: we’re innovative, sustainable,
international, fun, challenging, exciting, full of opportunity. The problem with
this approach is that, the more messages companies communicate, the
more diluted and ineffective these messages become.
Universum resources available to help:
Employer Brand
Report
Talent Insight
Report
Understand how your target group
perceives your company.
Understand what is most important
to your target group.
Understand that the first step to successful communication is understanding
what their target group wants.
How top employers address this:

8. Question #4: What do students think about my
company? What do they think about my competitors?
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9. Answer: It depends on who you ask.
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Just like different students want different things in a company, different
students also have varied perceptions of you as an employer – and of
your competitors. It’s important to ensure that the right messages are
resonating, and that they are distinct from those of your competitors.
Universum resources available to help:
Employer
Brand Report
Understand what is most
important to your target group,
as well as how your target
group perceives your company
and your competitors.
How top employers address this:
Regularly check in on student perceptions of their brand, as well as their
competitors’ brands, and find areas where they can set themselves apart.

10. Question #5: How can I reach more of the right talent?
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11. Answer: Invest in large-scale and more targeted
branding initiatives.
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Even if you have a small-scale, targeted recruitment strategy, it’s still
important to raise your overall brand attractiveness to make sure you appeal
to this group.
Activation
Solutions
Reach a broad audience
through advertising in the
Wall Street Journal.
Engage with targeted talent
groups and tell the right story
on social media.
Universum resources available to help:
Combine a targeted branding approach (for example, campus visits and social
media) with more broad communication campaigns to drive awareness and
brand engagement.
How top employers address this:

12. Question #6: Will my offers be accepted?
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13. Answer: Ask previous candidates!
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Too often, recruiters do so much heavy lifting through the campus
season to identify and attract the right candidates – only to have their
offers declined at the end of the fall. In addition to wasting precious
resources, this forces them to start from scratch to fill necessary roles.
Universum resources available to help:
Accept/ Decline
Study
Understand why previous candidates accepted
or rejected your offer, or why your interns
aren’t converting to full time hires.
Ensure honest and objective
answers by using a third-party
to survey.
Get to the bottom of why their offers aren’t being accepted by asking
candidates, in order to uncover quick fixes or larger issues at hand.
How top employers address this:

14. Question #7: How should I approach social media?
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15. Answer: Use data, insight, and people to guide your
strategy.
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Everyone knows they should be on social media –but few people know
how to do it effectively. Many companies don’t know where to begin:
should their careers Facebook roll up into their corporate page? Who
should be responsible for managing it? It takes time and resources to
produce content that resonates with your target talent.
Universum resources available to help:
Blueberry Social
Measurement
Activation
Solutions
Discover how your messages are being
interpreted and received on social
media, compared to your competitors.
Engage with target talent groups and
tell the right story on social media.
How top employers address this:
Develop content that appeals to their target group, and measure its success,
adjusting where necessary.

16. Question #8: How will I know that my efforts are
yielding results?
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17. Answer: What gets measured gets done.
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At the end of the day, your efforts mean very little if you’re not sure
you’re on track. By measuring progress and tracking your results, you’ll
be able to continue to improve, as well as ensure that your efforts are
paying off.
Universum resources available to help:
KPI
Dashboard
Employer Brand
Report
Set actionable goals and measure the
success of your employer brand and
employer branding activities.
Understand how your target group
perceives your company and your
competitors.
How top employers address this:
They set out specific, achievable, and challenging goals in order to look back
at their branding efforts and truly measure the difference.