Time to reimagine recruitment

The way we engage, persuade, recruit and retain students is fundamentally broken, particularly at the domestic level. 

The results affect pretty much everybody who works in HE.

Facing capped international enrolments and a highly uncertain regulatory environment, many universities have turned attention to maximising domestic enrolments – which is easy enough for perennial favourite disciplines like psychology, but appears to be much more of a challenge for some STEM and humanities degrees.

Institutions still tend to fall into the lament that nothing can be done, but if you look a little deeper, and see the way that we currently try to interest / engage / persuade/ retain students, it is pretty obvious that there is room to improve on the status quo. All you have to do is sit with a Year 12 student and try to describe the difference between like courses offered at each institution in your State or Territory and the challenges start to become obvious – let alone when you try to help them enrol. If you hope for help after 5pm or on a weekend, or try to find clear evidence-based answers to help you on your career guidance quest, then the limitations of service in our sector suddenly become very real indeed.

It is worth pointing out that these issues extend far beyond the marketing and recruitment teams – the boundaries of the marketing and communication function, like the outdated professional/academic dichotomy. 

After reviewing more HE Marketing and Recruitment teams than anyone else in Australia and working with more than 30 institutions, I have observed some really clear themes. Many can be fixed relatively easily – which is a reason to have hope at a time when optimism seems to be in short supply.

Many of the issues below revolve around allowing staff to operate differently, and contributing to change. The marketing and communications function should extend across most staff in an institution. The point of a marketing / comms / recruitment/ advancement team is to be a locus of expertise which enables consistent and effective marketing functions to be undertaken by staff across the institution. The most effective institutions empower and engage their staff to help deliver the strategic rollout of brand/ communications/ recruitment.

Five ways to thrive

Here’s five common themes relating to how to improve marketing, communications and recruitment – and unlock enrolments which could save or grow jobs. 

1. Blinkers off – there is an expectation that marketing and recruitment is essentially about advertising, events and promotions, but very few marketing teams are allowed to be involved in the other basic elements of marketing – price, product, people. Yes, I know you all think you do. Feel free to keep the blinkers on, just don’t expect change until you reframe the internal dialogue.
2. Contract in some of your marketing and recruitment – there’s a reluctance to seriously consider bringing in outsiders, unless it’s development of an ad campaign. HE leaders and workers alike conflate outsourcing with redundancies – but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are a constant stream of new jobs advertised where outsourcing should be considered as an alternative. If the job can be done better and cheaper externally, then it’s time to look at your contract governance and see if you can make it work. During the pandemic I spied an ad for a routine full time marketing content job that I could have easily fulfilled in 1.5 days a week and it was paying twice my salary. I didn’t even get an interview because I was overqualified. I didn’t necessarily want the job, but that incident was symbolic of the tyranny of low expectations and inadequate performance management that I have observed in many teams (academic and professional).
3. Contract in additional services – conflict of interest from me here, but I don’t get this situation at all, so it’s worth sharing. Right now, unis can enrol additional students by insourcing support to find more leads and respond to calls after 5 and on weekends at no extra cost. It’s not a trick – it costs no more than existing student acquisition cost. It’s a win for the contractor who gets the work; a win for the student who gets better service and a win for the university, getting additional students at existing costs. But most institutions won’t even talk about this idea. Many don’t appear to be ready to accept that the current recruitment model is broken, but are happy to cut jobs on the basis of no planned revenue growth.
4. Performance manage – performance management has a really bad name – used as some sort of euphemism for a sadistic all stick no carrot staff management approach. What I have seen across most institutions is a lack of role clarity and accountability, leaving often young or lower-ranking staff deeply dissatisfied and not certain of what they need to do next, let alone why. Staff embrace accountability if they have some say in how to achieve it, and understand what needs to be achieved and why.
5. Communication – this is an entire topic on its own. Communication is a disaster area in many institutions, ranging from internal staff communication to internal student engagement, to inefficient staff meetings, secretive executives, secretive staff, silos, university visions, values and strategies and who ordered those terrible cucumber and mint sandwiches last planning day? Suffice to say for the purposes of this exercise there are a couple of standouts. 1. Confusing messaging and lack of easy follow up spruiking courses to students and 2. The persistent addiction to box ticking in school engagement, measured only by the correct use of latest images in the PowerPoint that recruiters are armed with to bore whole classrooms of secondary students to death. User-centric communication, driven by the interests, aptitude and engagement preferences of the audience and revised regularly through independent research and feedback, is the simple answer.

There are of course far more themes and opportunities to reimagine the marketing and recruitment function and improve outcomes, but in the interests of brevity, five will have to suffice for today.