Campus Recruitment

What campus recruitment is

Campus recruitment (التوظيف من الجامعات), also called campus hiring, is a recruitment channel whose source is students in their final years of study and recent graduates, run on a yearly cycle tied to the academic calendar. The channel is one of those to which a hire can be attributed when an organisation records its source of hire.

What sets the channel apart in its structure is that supply moves with the season, not with need. Other channels open when a requisition to fill a position is raised and close when the position is filled. Campus recruitment opens when people graduate, whether or not the organisation has a vacancy on that day.

In campus recruitment, commitment comes before the need is known

The consequence is that an organisation commits to a number of hires before it knows whether it will need them. Offers are made in one season and start dates fall months later, and between the two dates the organisation’s needs can change.

For that reason the “requisition, then candidates” model does not suit this channel. Instead, the number is built on an estimate made in workforce planning, for a period that extends past the start date. An organisation that runs the channel on the requisitions open on the day of the season has measured a need in January in order to meet it in September.

A decision that can be overlooked at this point is what happens to someone who accepted an offer when the need then changes. An offer is a commitment by the organisation to a person who has planned their year around it. Withdrawing the offer after acceptance costs the channel more in reputation than it saves, and word of the withdrawal can reach the whole cohort within days.

What follows from withdrawing an offer once it has been accepted depends on what was written in the offer and has its own sources, and we have not verified it in the references we reviewed.

The campus recruitment funnel, and where candidates drop out

Take a single season at one organisation:

• 900 people applied.
• 260 passed the initial screen, or 28.89%.
• 95 reached assessment, or 36.54% of those who passed the screen.
• 40 received an offer, or 42.11% of those assessed.
• 31 accepted the offer, or 77.5% of those offered.
• 26 started work, or 83.87% of those who accepted.

These figures are assumed in order to show the structure of the funnel. We have no published reference for the Saudi market on which to base a conversion rate at any of its steps.

The last two steps are the ones particular to this channel. A person who accepts an offer may be holding another offer at the same time, and a person who accepts in the spring may not start in the autumn. Taken together, the two steps mean that only 65% of offers end in a start.

In this example the rates at the first three steps are of a kind any channel could show, and the difference lies in the last two. Anyone who carries another channel’s rates over to campus recruitment will estimate the number of offers at about a third below what is needed.

For planning, this means that an organisation wanting 26 starters has to make 40 offers, assess 95 candidates and reach 900 applicants. The number of starters required is not the number to commit to at any earlier stage of the funnel, and an organisation that makes 26 offers to get 26 starters begins its year nine short.

Campus recruitment presence: wide or deep

After the number of hires, the second decision in this channel is how many institutions to attend. That decision can be settled by reach, but the figures point elsewhere.

Take the same season spread across 14 institutions. Suppose 3 of them supplied 520 applicants, or 57.78% of the 900, and 18 of the 26 who started, or 69.23%. Three institutions out of fourteen would then be producing more than two thirds of the outcome.

The cost of attending does not follow that split, because it is paid fourteen times. The remedy is not to drop the other eleven at once, since some of them may be new and not yet given time. Instead, attendance can be divided into deep presence at the few that produce and light presence at the rest, reviewed every two years.

The split across institutions in the example is assumed. How many institutions to attend is decided by each institution’s yield at the organisation concerned, not by a general figure.

Deep presence does not mean more days on campus, but a relationship that extends beyond the season: a role in graduation projects, speakers from the organisation, and a known route into training. That relationship is what leads an institution to recommend candidates, and a recommendation from inside the institution can do more than an advertisement.

Screening campus recruitment applicants without a work record

In other channels, applicants are screened on the work they have done before. In campus recruitment there is no work record, so screening can fall back on what is available: the name of the institution and the grade point average. Both measure something, but what they measure may not be what the job needs.

The practical effect is that an organisation filters 900 applicants on a criterion it did not choose, one imposed on it by the absence of any other, and then attributes what happens a year later to the generation or to the market.

The alternative is to build screening on a tool that can be described and measured. A work sample test, a short task taken from the job and judged against a written standard, produces output that can be compared. In a structured interview, where every candidate for the role is asked the same questions and scored against a scale set in advance, what is asked and how each answer is rated are standardised. What the validity and reliability of a screening tool establish is covered in test validity and test reliability.

A practical constraint remains. A tool applied to 900 people has to be short, and a short tool measures less. One way through is two stages: a light tool for everyone, and a longer one for those who remain after the first.

Which screening tool suits a campus intake depends on what the job requires, and the definitions of the tools linked above set out what each one measures.

Campus recruitment cost is divided by those who started

Suppose the cost of the whole season was SAR 480,000, covering attendance at universities, materials, assessment and the time of everyone who took part. The cost per hire is then SAR 480,000 divided by 26, or SAR 18,461.54 for each person who started.

Divided by the 40 offers instead, the same season cost would come to SAR 12,000 per offer, which is 65% of the correct figure. Reports on this channel can make that error, because an offer here is a celebrated and recorded event, while the start date falls months later and may not be followed up by whoever prepared the report. What goes into the figure is covered in cost per hire, the average an organisation spends to fill one position over a period.

Judging campus recruitment on its delayed effects

Judging this channel on the number of hires is premature, because what distinguishes campus recruitment is its delayed effect:

• Retention after eighteen months. A cohort half of which leaves in its second year has produced nothing to set against its cost, however good the season’s figures looked. Retention is measured by the retention rate, the share of the people employed at the start of a period who are still employed at its end.
• Time to normal performance. In this channel that time can be longer than for an experienced hire, which is to be expected and planned for, not discovered after the start date.
• Level of performance reached, which is what quality of hire describes. The channel is compared with others on that level, not on how fast positions close.

So the evaluation of a season is not complete until eighteen months after its start date, and an organisation that decides to expand or close the channel after three months decides on figures that do not yet show what the channel produced.

In the references we reviewed, we found no measurement for the Saudi market on which to base the effect of campus recruitment on retention or on performance.

What makes a campus recruitment season work

• A real role waiting for each hire. A cohort hired without described work spends its first months waiting to be assigned, and that wait can cost the organisation the cohort. Describing the work is the subject of job analysis.
• Onboarding designed for the cohort rather than the individual. Twenty people starting in the same week is a different situation from one new employee, and a cohort needs arrangements of its own. The basis is employee onboarding, the organised process that carries a new hire from accepting the offer to working at full productivity.
• A declared time horizon. The channel is an investment measured over three years. An organisation that enters for one season and then leaves builds nothing in the channel, because a university remembers who comes back.
• Attention to what students say about the experience. Word travels in this channel, because applicants know one another, and the effect on the organisation’s employer brand extends beyond a single season. The subject is candidate experience, the impression an applicant forms of an organisation across the whole hiring journey.

Campus recruitment and the named programmes in the Kingdom

In the Kingdom, campus recruitment overlaps with named programmes and initiatives concerned with training graduates, employing them and supporting that employment. Among them are Tamheer (تمهير), employment support (دعم التوظيف) and the human capability development programme (برنامج تنمية القدرات البشرية).

The conditions and durations of each programme, and what follows from taking part in it, have their own official sources. What can be said is that the overlap exists, and that confusing a recruitment channel the organisation runs with a programme that has its own administering body and conditions creates expectations on both sides that no commitment stands behind.

What campus recruitment is not

• Talent sourcing is a directed search for people with particular profiles, wherever they are. Campus recruitment has a set source and a fixed season.
• Employee referral relies on the network of the people inside the organisation. A campus channel relies on a relationship with an educational institution.
• Training during study covers arrangements for a student before graduation, which have their own rules and instruments. Such training can be a way into campus recruitment without being the same thing.

Before committing to a campus recruitment season

Four questions come first. How many starters are needed, and in which month? How many offers does reaching that number take, at the conversion rates the organisation itself has rather than those in reports? What described role awaits each of them on the day they start? And who will follow the cohort for eighteen months and report on how much of it remains?

An organisation without an answer to the fourth question will measure its season by the number of offers, the only figure it has. A channel measured at the top of its funnel can be expanded each time it appears to succeed, while its cost surfaces somewhere else that nobody connects with it.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• High Volume Hiring
• Cost per Hire
• Employee Onboarding
• Candidate Experience
• Structured Interview