Just as any corporation needs to market their business to attract quality employees, universities also need to market themselves to attract top talent. But too often they do not. 

Many universities have relied on traditional hiring strategies that consist of writing a job advert and posting it on a job board. However, as internationalization has increased the competition for top talent and candidate behaviour has changed, this strategy is no longer effective. 

Universities need to pivot to a more holistic recruitment approach and implement a recruitment marketing strategy to continue to stay competitive. Recruitment marketing, while not a new idea in the private sector, is rarely discussed in the context of academic hiring. But in today’s hiring landscape, investing in a recruitment marketing based talent attraction strategy is essential for any forward-thinking university.

What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the practice of using marketing strategies to promote the value of working for a particular employer as a way to attract, engage, and recruit employees. It is a process of actively promoting your institution to build awareness, interest, and ultimately get the best people to become part of your university community. 

Recruitment marketing has emerged at a time when the academic hiring landscape is changing. There are more qualified candidates than ever before competing for jobs, yet candidates are also becoming a bit more selective. Thanks to easy access to the internet and digital tools, as well as the proliferation of social media, the information about universities available to candidates is now much more robust. 

Candidates are no longer restricted to simply understanding which departments a university has and their current vacancies. They can now search for in-depth information about the work environment, the research they are concusting, potential colleagues and even more intangible aspects like the social and cultural benefits of different institutions. 

As a result, academic candidates now behave more like consumers and universities need to market to them as such. The hiring process has shifted from universities choosing candidates, to candidates choosing the university. 

Recruitment marketing integrates new skills into attracting and engaging top talent. It requires institutions to adopt a funnel approach to recruitment. At the top of the tunnel, sits awareness of your university, followed by consideration of your university, and finally genuine interest in your university. Essentially, candidates need to know your university exists, then feel compelled to learn more about it, and lastly, be interested enough to invest time in applying to your open position. 

In order to be successful at every step of the process, academic institutions need to find relevant ways to find and attract top talent. This requires a comprehensive approach to hiring with a specific marketing and advertising skill set — not something universities typically have the time or resources to invest in. 

This thoughtful approach can only work with a complimentary digital marketing and advertising strategy which includes creating regular, engaging content and posting that content to some kind of landing page. It also requires a targeted social media strategy as well as technical knowledge of SEO and landing page design. In order to best create this holistic marketing approach, it is imperative for universities to think critically about the candidate experience. 

Employer Branding vs. Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment marketing and employer branding are often discussed in a similar context and while they do share some aspects, they differ in some significant ways. Like recruitment marketing, employer branding originated in the private sector but is now vital to academic recruitment. 

Recruitment marketing is the tactic that a university uses to promote its employer brand. Before thinking about how to recruit candidates, a university needs to spend some time looking inward. What makes your organization unique and attractive to academic candidates? What sets you apart from the competition? How do you want candidates to see you? A well thought out employer brand can serve as a roadmap for where your organization wants to go and how you will get there. 

Your employer brand is also partly determined by university employees, students, and potential candidates and how they discuss your organization across their networks. In this way, universities have less direct control of their image. 

Recruitment marketing, on the other hand, has more of an external focus as it is more about how you communicate your brand and your story. Recruitment marketing allows you to have more control over your narrative which can be particularly powerful in attracting the best candidates. Although you can’t always control how people talk about your brand, you can shape the conversation with a targeted approach to recruitment.

Recruitment marketing means taking a thoughtful and patient perspective to attract and retain the best people. First, candidates must know your institution exists. Then they must be inclined to consider you as a potential employer. Lastly, they must be intrigued so they become invested in applying. Using a recruitment marketing strategy will help you move candidates through each step of this process. As a result, your organization will get its share of amazing candidates who are invested in your organization and excited to make a match. 

The University of Jyväskylä is an internationally renowned research university and an expert in education that focuses on human and natural sciences. We spoke to Marjo Salmenkivi, Team Leader, Recruitment Team, to learn more about how the university uses social media to create awareness and promote its employer brand. 

You use job promotion campaigns on social media for many of your international faculty recruitments. Why do you believe it’s important to take such a proactive approach to faculty recruitment?

MS: We use job promotion campaigns to promote assistant professorships, which are important recruitments for our university. When we hire a person for this type of a position, we commit to a years-long relationship since those on the tenure track can eventually get tenure. By using job promotion campaigns, we seek to attract top talent to the University of Jyväskylä. Our university is a small organisation on a global scale, so it’s important for us to make the University of Jyväskylä known and to talk about the top-quality research conducted at the university. It’s especially important to specifically reach passive job seekers, whose attention we might not otherwise be able to capture.

You are a university that really understands the value of creating awareness of your institution and promoting your employer brand. What would you say to a university that doesn’t yet understand why awareness is so valuable? 

MS: Increasing awareness of our university through all available channels is certainly worth it. You should promote your employer brand on all available internal channels, but it’s also good to utilise commercial channels too, especially if your university isn’t the most well known. Talk about the research done at your university, about your researchers, and why coming to work with you is a good choice. Every university has their own strengths, talk openly about yours!

We’ve seen, for example, that the social media campaigns we’ve run with Academic Positions have reached a very large group of potential applicants. We’re repeatedly present among a relevant audience, and because of this, the awareness of our organisation keeps growing. Whether the average number of applicants we’ve received or the average quality of applicants has increased is difficult to comment on since we’re so early in the process. We’ve only recently begun with our employer branding marketing, but we hope to see them increase. We will continue to invest more into analytics and monitor the stream of applicants in our recruitment system, and thus be able to have concrete data on the impact these campaigns have, and adjust our marketing strategy accordingly.

In any case, I believe that deliberate and continual investments in employer branding marketing will increase awareness of the university and thus bring us better quality applications to our open positions, as well as engage and pique the interest of passive applicants.

Looking into the future, what are some things you’re seeing now that you think will have a big impact on the way universities attract top talent in the next few years?

The competition for the top researchers will undoubtedly continue to be intense in the future. To stand out from among the competition, you have to work purposefully with employer branding marketing in the long term. We strive to regularly be visible in international forums and promote our researchers and their research. I believe that our consistent investments in employer branding marketing will bear fruit in the long term. 

As a university that has very quickly adopted modern digital recruitment practices, how are you trying to stay ahead of the curve?

The digitalisation of the recruitment processes at our university continues, and we’re committed to continuing this work which makes the application processes easier for both domestic and international researchers. We also review our recruitment processes and work to make them even more effortless and transparent than before. We’ve created a recruitment team dedicated to taking care of open positions and applicant communications. They tell our applicants how the recruitment is progressing and quickly let them know when their application doesn’t make it into the next phase of the recruitment process. We know that anyone applying for a position would hope they get the job, but in the cases where this doesn’t happen, they are immediately notified so they can focus their sights on new opportunities without delay. We also inform our applicants about who gets chosen for the open position and, whenever possible, we give applicants feedback on why they weren’t chosen. We’re also looking into implementing a system to make it possible to give this feedback even more effectively, utilising intelligent technological tools to do so.

We also have an excellent International Staff Services Team that helps our international staff and faculty with practical matters associated with their arrival to Finland, like residence permits or work permits. They also arrange various activities to help bring the community together. In addition to this, the ISS Team’s website has a large variety of information available, ranging from work and integration to society to leisure and the Jyväskylä region itself. We are also committed to employer branding marketing, promoting relevant material on our social media channels and on our own website. We value our own employees and alumni as ambassadors of our organisation. In addition to this, external partners like Academic Positions and exposure through these channels—like with Academic Stories and job promotion campaigns on social media for open positions—are an important part of that strategy.

Hiring for an academic position can be difficult and time consuming. Competition for academic jobs is high and potential applicants are all over the globe. Thanks to increased researcher mobility and the explosion of new universities in the past few decades, recruitment for academic positions has grown increasingly more challenging. With so many universities vying for talent, it can be difficult to distinguish your job and university from others, leading to higher instances of failed recruitment.

Although you could simply write a generic job advert and post it on a free job board, the likelihood that you’ll find quality candidates in a reasonable amount of time is low. Finding the right person for your job requires patience and a targeted marketing approach. Using a platform like Academic Positions to advertise your vacancies can result in more relevant applicants in less time. 

Failed recruitment is costly. It means more time being short staffed, more time crafting an advert that will attract new or better candidates, and perhaps more money to advertise and market your position again. However, with a bit more initial investment, you can improve your candidate search and get your position filled by the right person, the first time around. 

With so many free job boards, we understand why you may be wary of paying to advertise your vacancies. We’ve built a reputation of trust and efficiency with our comprehensive approach to academic recruitment that will help you attract more qualified candidates. Here are five reasons universities choose Academic Positions to help with their recruitment.

1. You will reach the most relevant candidates

Our job boards allow job seekers to sign up for job alerts for more than 600 academic fields. Many free services allow only a handful of custom alerts, drastically reducing the number of relevant candidates who will see the advert. Our specific and targeted approach to advertising your position means more and better candidates will see your job posting vastly increasing your potential applicant pool. 

All advertisements posted on Academic Positions include a job alert which notifies relevant registered job seekers about your vacancy. Instead of hoping that qualified applicants stumble upon your job advert, we can help make it more visible so more qualified candidates find it. Our helpful guides to writing targeted job postings will ensure they click through to read more. 

2. You can spend less time publicizing your position and more time working on your research 

Many free job boards require you to upload and publish your own advert. At Academic Positions, we provide hassle free publication by taking care of advertising your open positions for you. 

Just as you are experts in your field, we are experts in ours. We let you do what you do best and we’ll take care of the rest. 

3. You will benefit from international visibility

Unlike the majority of our competitors, our job board is truly international. We have an international portal where we post adverts in English, as well as 13 national portals where we post adverts in the national language. You’ll reach more candidates with the ability to post vacancies in multiple languages. 

Academic job seekers are eager to find the most relevant and advanced research facilities within their field of study, and recognize that this often means looking internationally. Because they are passionate about their studies and professional community, academics are happy to explore opportunities worldwide. We help you capitalize on this willingness to find the right fit by helping you find the best candidates no matter where in the world they are. 

4. You get full access to invaluable data

We take a data-driven approach to recruitment marketing to provide our customers with the most efficient and proven methods for advertising open positions. Our performance reports give you unique insights into the performance of your advert on our job board, taking the guesswork out of what is, or is not, working. 

Optimising your recruitment with data will help you attract better candidates, track agency performance, and foster a goal-driven working environment. Our metrics will help you recruit smarter, saving you time and money. 

5. You will receive more traffic from search engines 

While it would be nice to simply publish your vacancy online and know that people will find it, it takes time and effort to make sure your content ranks in the search results. In order for potential candidates to be able to find your job advert online, the website you publish it on needs to have good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

SEO is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website gets from search engines so that it ranks at the top of the search results. Because most candidates start their academic job search by using a search engine, if the job website doesn’t rank in the top results, you’ll be behind your competitors right from the start. 

Luckily, we are well versed in SEO best practices and consistently rank in the top search results for most academic job queries. We work tirelessly to make sure our listings remain at the top of search engine searches so we can deliver high quality traffic to all the jobs published on our site. Free job boards cannot always guarantee such excellent search engine rankings.

Just because you can post a job for free, does not mean you should. In fact, while you may be saving money up front, a failed recruitment campaign can end up costing you hours of wasted time. Investing in a paid job board will not only leave you with more time to pursue your research, it will also provide you with top talent to enhance your work and elevate your university’s profile.

Academic recruitment seems like a relatively straightforward process. You post a job, find a pool of qualified applicants, and choose the one best suited for the job. Unfortunately, we know it’s not that easy. Even with a stellar job posting and description, there are so many other factors at play that make academic recruitment particularly challenging. 

Most HR staffs and search committees would love to have a robust pool of qualified candidates from which to choose. But finding someone with the right competencies, who is available for your start date, in your location (or willing to move), speaks the right language, and sees your advert then applies…can feel like finding the needle in the haystack. 

For many universities, the reality is often a limited applicant pool with irrelevant, unqualified, or simply mediocre applicants. Whatever the reason, not getting enough applicants and having to repost a vacancy is not only frustrating, but also time consuming and costly. 

Although there is no magic formula or remedy, there are several steps you can take to put your university in the best position to reach more and better applicants. 

Step 1: Improve the text of your job advert 

Because the job advert is the primary way candidates will learn about your job, it’s best to start with an honest look at the job description. If you are receiving candidates with irrelevant work experience or skills, you might not have explained the details of the job accurately. If you simply did not receive many applications, your job description might be too brief. You need to include enough information about the job to convince people to apply. You may also consider adjusting the formatting of your ad and adding bullet points to improve the readability. 

However, you also want to be careful not to include so many requirements that only a few people apply. People only apply to jobs they think they actually have a chance of getting. Be both descriptive and realistic in your job posting. Consider what the job entails and the kind of candidates you hope to attract and write the job advert with those considerations in mind.

Step 2: Carefully choose the job title 

The job title is like a big, flashing light. It is the first thing job seekers see and can mean the difference between the perfect candidate clicking on the advert or simply scrolling by. First, the title should be specific. “PhD student in organic chemistry” is better than the more general “PhD student.” Because there is some nuance between countries about academic titles, avoid internal or country specific titles. For example, in Austria “university assistant” can mean “PhD student” but applicants outside of Austria or Europe might be unfamiliar with this distinction. 

Step 3: Promote your employer brand

While there are certain characteristics that all universities share, no two universities are the same. Your institution has unique qualities that make it special. Be sure to highlight those features and promote all the ways in which your university is the best place to work. Think about how the university supports employees and the community as a whole, as well as location of the university and the available facilities. Research centers, libraries, labs, and sports facilities are all excellent distinguishers. 

You want any potential applicants to clearly understand why your university is a better place to work than your competitors. Your university’s social media channels are a great place to help communicate your brand and create brand awareness. The more you can promote your institution, the more potential applicants will continue to seek out opportunities at your university.  

Step 4: Increase your visibility

This may seem obvious, but in order to attract the most candidates, job seekers must know you have job openings. Because of the increased competition for university employees, it is no longer adequate to simply post your job on your university career page and hope the best candidates find it. Your vacancy must also be available online on relevant academic job boards. You can also advertise with professional associations in your field of study.

Consider not just advertising in the traditional sense, but also using social media to increase your university’s visibility. Working with academic recruitment marketing partners is another way to boost your visibility and build your brand. These companies are experts at increasing interest in your organization and attracting  candidates. 

Step 5: Review your application process

Of course you want to ensure you have well qualified candidates by asking for relevant details in the application, but are you asking too much in this phase of the hiring process? According to a study done by CareerBuilder, “60 percent of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity.” There is an enduring fallacy in academia that these 60 percent are candidates who don’t really want the job, but this isn’t the case. Highly qualified candidates are also discouraged by lengthy applications and academic applications in particular are notoriously long. 

There may be parts of your application process that can be shortened or moved to a later stage in the process. Many candidates are reluctant to spend the time and energy on your application when they aren’t even sure they’ll hear from you. Both you and the applicants are more likely to give more time when you both feel you’ve got a real, vested interest. 

Step 6: Beware of personal and unconscious biases

Like it or not, we all carry personal and unconscious biases. These are often certain ideas or stereotypes about gender, race, or nationality that may influence decision-making. Try not to overlook a candidate on the basis of anything other than the qualifications and work history they have shared. It can sometimes be helpful to ignore information like names or nationalities while you evaluate the rest of the application. 

While examining your biases can be uncomfortable, it is essential if you want to attract and retain the best candidates available. 

To learn more about how to improve your chances of a successful recruitment, download our job advertising checklist. This comprehensive checklist will ensure you don’t miss any vital steps before, during, or after the application period.

Data is incredibly valuable when it comes to improving your hiring practices, as it allows you to optimise processes, save money, and increase the quality of your hires. Once you gather your data, either from your own internal methods or from your recruitment partner, you must utilise it efficiently. 

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to start optimising your recruitment with internal data, as well as how you can keep your recruitment partners accountable to providing you with their data points, too.

Internal data

Access to recruitment data is valuable, but if you don’t know how to use it, you won’t see tangible improvements in your recruitment strategy. For example, let’s say that you’re currently tracking your interview to placement ratio; this involves tracking how many candidates it takes to successfully fill a role. 

It’s a valuable metric to track, as it gives you an indication of the quality of candidates that you’re interviewing, as well as how long the decision-making process takes. This data can be used to optimise your recruitment in two key ways:

1. See where your current screening process may need improvements 

Tracking interview to placement ratio gives you the opportunity to see if there are issues with the way that you are selecting candidates for both video and campus interviews. If you find that the total number of people you have to interview in order to make a hire is increasing, especially for the same types of roles, it might be time to change up your interview questions. Perhaps you’re not asking the right questions so your candidates aren’t getting a chance to wow you. You might also want to change your process if you find that you are frequently needing to invite additional candidates for campus interviews in order to make a hire. If you can reduce the number of candidates you interview by a small percentage, you will save time and resources in the process.

2. Track how long it takes to make a placement based on how many interviews are carried out 

This data gives you the opportunity to see how your interview to placement ratio affects your time to hire, as well as allowing you to see if you are frequently losing good candidates partway through your process because your time to hire is too long. 

Understanding how your time to hire differs between different types of positions can help when you have to recruit for multiple positions simultaneously. For example, if you need to hire both a PhD student and a postdoc for a project and you know your time to hire is longer for a postdoc, you can start the postdoc recruitment process first. 

You can see how one data point can positively impact your recruitment strategy, which is why we recommend introducing data tracking into your recruitment strategy. 

In our downloadable guide, we have created a tracker that enables you to track up to 7 data points, however, don’t feel obliged to start with all 7. If you’re new to data-driven recruitment, start off with tracking 1-2 points and phasein other data points as you become more comfortable. Try to start by identifying a weak point you currently have within your institution and use that as the first data point you track. 

Recruitment partners

For some roles, you may look to engage a recruitment partner to create more awareness and visibility of your vacancy. A good recruitment partner should be able to provide you with data about your performance on their platform and be able to advise you on how to use this data to improve your recruitment process. 

So, what kind of data can a recruitment partner provide you with?

Depending on the type of recruitment partner you work with, you will have access to different data points. Here are some you may be able to acquire and how you can use them: 

1. Candidate source: Knowing what countries your candidates are coming is an incredibly useful data point for you to be made aware of. It can give you insight into where there are strong talent pools and reveal potential new countries of interest that you can target in the future with outreach or advertising campaigns.
2. Traffic: Recruitment partners should act as a vehicle to drive traffic to your open roles and ensure that you are receiving substantial visibility. They can provide you with monthly traffic reports, so you can see how often your available positions are being viewed.
3. Top-performing jobs: Similar to traffic, your recruitment partner can also provide you with details on your highest performing jobs. This could be the number of people viewing the role, as well as the number of applicants. This will allow you to understand which types of roles are in high demand as well as the types of roles that perform best on each platform. 

Optimising your recruitment with data doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, it can be a mixture of incorporating your internal and external data points and using them to tweak 1-2 things in your recruitment strategy over time.

Do you want the full guide on how to design a data-driven recruitment strategy? Download our comprehensive guide below. 

Data is a powerful way to measure performance and is present within most modern recruitment strategies. The growing popularity of applicant tracking systems (ATSs) has made it easier for those who do academic hiring to access data from their hiring process. However, not all universities have made this investment or use data to influence and adjust their overall strategy. There are other ways to get access to data without investing in an ATS, and this can be achieved through using partners or designing your own process.

In this piece, we’re going to outline the 6 benefits of a data-driven recruitment strategy, as well as provide you with a downloadable guide full of valuable insights (and a free template) so you can start tracking your recruitment data and using it to your advantage. 

So, here are the top 6 benefits of data-driven recruitment:

1. It increases candidate quality

Every recruitment team wants to find the best candidates on the market, and using data can help you increase candidate quality in two main ways. Firstly, you will be able to see clearly how many candidates you’re interviewing to make a hire, and secondly, you will be able to identify how many candidates make it through your interview process. 

This will show whether you are screening candidates properly, thus increasing the quality of your hires.

2. It improves the candidate experience

Although hiring the best talent should be every institution’s goal, the candidate experience should be at the top of your priority list, too. Candidate experience not only shapes how your university or research institute is viewed by other institutions, but it can also affect whether candidates choose to accept the role you offer.

Candidate experience is crucial within academia, as highly sought-after candidates won’t just accept a position because it provides great career opportunities. A lot of the time, an individual will have to uproot their life to take a new position, so they’re interviewing you just as much as you’re interviewing them! 

Although still considered new within academic recruitment, candidate feedback forms are an interesting way to improve the candidate experience overall. They often work on a simple 1-10 scoring system, which can allow you to see unanimous high or low scores in a particular area. 

You can use this candidate feedback to improve or maintain parts of your hiring process. For example, the forms may show that candidates want to talk to HR or the international office during the interview process to understand the relocation services your institution offers international employees. 

3. It improves processes and keeps teams organised

Recruitment can be stressful, regardless of whether you’re managing the whole process yourself or as part of a search committee. If you are managing the whole process yourself, data such as what interview stages are due to be complete, or what paperwork needs to be sent are simple but powerful data points to keep you organised. 

Tracking these data points is equally as important when serving on or chairing a search committee. Having committee members log their progress in a centralised document, such as a spreadsheet, will help you stay organised.

4. It decreases your time to hire

Academic hiring is a notoriously long process and it’s not unusual for it to take months, or sometimes years to fill a vacancy. Tracking how many interview stages candidates are going through (and how long it takes them to get to the end of a process) could help you spot bottlenecks or opportunities to speed up the process, even by just a few days.

Don’t be disheartened if your time to hire doesn’t go down overnight, though – filling a research vacancy is a marathon, not a sprint! Instead, use this data point as a point of reference to come back to once a year and see if some positions have been filled quicker than others, or, where you may have rushed the process. 

5. It decreases your cost per hire

Hiring is expensive, especially if you choose to advertise beyond your university’s careers page. A data-driven recruitment approach might show you that certain advertising channels are inflating your cost per hire without delivering promising candidates. For example, advertising in a local paper or academic journal is costly, and the ROI of this exposure is difficult to measure. By tracking the sources of your candidates and hires, you can see which channels give you your money’s worth. 

You may find that certain advertising partners or job boards are consistently yielding the best ROI, meaning you can become laser-focused with your budget, rather than putting it into multiple “pots” instead!

6. It removes some bias from your process

Although data doesn’t allow you to remove bias completely from the hiring process, it allows you to focus on facts and figures rather than opinions and intuition. If you are conscious about Diversity & Inclusion, tracking, for example, the number of female vs male candidates will allow you to see potential bias, as well as overall trends in female applicants and female hires. Universities are naturally keen to increase the representation of women in all academic roles, so you can use this data to then align your interview process accordingly!

In conclusion, a data-driven recruitment strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, it can be three or four points you measure that will undoubtedly benefit you in the future. 

Do you want the full guide on how to design a data-driven recruitment strategy? Fill in your information below to get our comprehensive guide.

RMIT University’s Vietnam presence was established in 2000, as a satellite campus of the well-known Australian university of technology, design, and enterprise. As Vietnam’s first international university campus, it is important that RMIT provides its students with an international community that supports their growth in an increasingly globalised world. We spoke to RMIT’s Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition Esther Walker, to learn more about how the university attracts international academic staff. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is your position at the university?

I’m the Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition for RMIT’s campuses in Vietnam. It’s myself and a team of five staff who basically recruit for all the positions at the university campuses in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Danang. We hire academics, professionals, and English educators. We’re a busy team. If you consider recruitment related roles as having peaks and troughs, we experience mainly peaks.

Why are internationalism and researcher mobility so important for the university? 

It provides a diversity in culture in the university. We’re an Australian university, so we follow the Australian education framework which grants Australian accredited qualifications upon completion of undergraduate and postgraduate MBA and PhD studies. We think a diversity of staff and a really multicultural environment is very important. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on effective mobility and it’s quite an extensive process to recruit and onboard expatriates. There’s a lot of processes to go through with regards to work permits, visas, relocation and, over the past 12 months, quarantine requirements. 

When you look at the faculty, are there a lot of faculty that come from Australia, being already familiar with the education system?

We do have a significant number of Australian academics, faculty members, and professional staff from other universities in Australia. We also have many staff from the UK and the US. There’s a familiarity with the foreign education systems, contemporary approaches to learning and teaching, and an important focus on industry engagement to build and support the employability of students once they have graduated. 

I would say our workforce is 64% locals and 36% expatriates, and our expatriate staff come from over 30 different countries globally. I thought that I’d previously worked for a multicultural organisation when I worked in Australia, but then I came to RMIT’s Vietnam campuses, and it’s clear that we are a truly multicultural and diverse workforce.

Looking at your careers page it’s clear that some of the benefits you offer are organised in a way to be very enticing for international staff, like salary packaging of school fees, flexible working, location support, language classes, and great health insurance. What are some of the other ways that you recruit expatriates to the university? 

We advertise on international academic job boards. We also use social media and rely on connections and networks of our staff, because Vietnam is perhaps not as well-known as a popular location for expatriates to relocate to, and some of the disciplines that we want to attract for our academic and professional roles are rather niche.

Ultimately, what I’ve found through discussions with staff, is that their motivation to join us isn’t purely based on the salary and benefits. As staff retention is a big ‘must’ for us, we want our staff to see our university as a good career move. We have a number of staff, local and expat, who have been with us for a long time. It was our 20-year anniversary last year and through employee recognition awards, we celebrated staff who have been here for 10, 15 and 20 years. I think offering other benefits such as supporting people with dependents to study at the university, pathways to professional and personal development, and flexible working, strengthens the brand of the university and the image of our campuses as world class international branches.

If you were going to then offer advice to a university that’s looking to diversify their staff more, where would you say to start? What are some of the focus areas?

To draw international staff, I think you need to be able to hire an experienced and agile HR workforce, and appoint key specialised staff who can support the entire employee lifecycle. You need HR experts, strong leaders with people management skills, talent managers, and organisational development, employee relations and compensation and benefits specialists. 

In terms of retention, we are constantly looking at how we can be better and add more value. How can we strengthen our brand? How can we develop talent? How can we enhance the candidate experience? That’s our focus over the next five years because ultimately it will affect retention, which can have a knock-on effect in so many ways, across the organisation.  

Reputation also plays a vital role in international recruitment. There are other universities in Vietnam, other international universities that are said to be competitors but RMIT is so established, it will take quite some time to catch up. We’re in our 21st year now, with a strong reputation in Vietnam; we’ve built credibility in the country and connected with industry. It makes us so well-known and that it gives us a lot of a lot of strength in terms of the brand and attracting students and staff to come and work here. As such, building reputation and providing quality support is my advice.

Traditional in-house recruitment has been reliant on already established relationships, reputation, and location. However, the new age of recruitment is heavily driven by data, which can allow talent teams to devise intelligent ways to hire and enable them to save time, money and resources on future recruitment efforts. 

We’re going to outline the importance of a data-driven recruitment strategy, as well as give you some tips on how to start using data in your recruitments even if you don’t have an applicant tracking system!

Why is a data-driven recruitment strategy important? 

It increases productivity and time-management

Hiring and retaining talent is a challenging task, and often recruitment teams are managing more than one role simultaneously. When we spoke to the University of Cologne’s Personnel Manager, Dr. Maria Schmitz-Hüser, she highlighted that, “Data is especially important for positions that need to be filled within a short period of time or that are difficult to fill. It’s also important in the cases where we are pressured to find someone.” Having this knowledge can allow you to delegate and prioritise tasks based on their importance, as evidenced by the data you acquire. 

It identifies weaknesses in your recruitment strategy

Each talent function will have weaknesses, and this shouldn’t be seen as negative. For example, your data may show you that a position that on average takes 4 weeks to fill is currently taking 9, in which case there is either a difficulty with candidate management or a training issue. 

It helps with attraction and retention of candidates

Data can clearly pinpoint how many candidates you are attracting at the initial stage, as well as how many you’ve hired. Data can also show you how many candidates are still within your institution in 3, 6, and 12 months time. You can then use this data to assess and improve your retention strategy. 

It allows you to forecast your recruitment drives 

Having data on when you last hired and how many people you hired can be a great metric to track, especially if you know when you can expect to receive the funding you’ll need to hire again. You can also forecast your recruitment drives based on headcount estimates and upcoming retirements. 

It helps with budget management and allocation

In 2020, the average agency cost can be between 10% to 30% of a candidate’s salary, which can be expensive depending on the seniority. The recruitment lifecycle is a costly one, and if measured incorrectly, it can eat into your budget quicker than you’d think. Having data can help you allocate enough budget at the right time for specific actions, rather than operating on guesswork.

4 steps to designing a data-driven recruitment strategy, without an ATS

An ATS, also known as an Applicant Tracking System, can be a time-saving and easy-to-use piece of technology that uses qualitative and quantitative data to improve your recruitment efforts. 

However, for some, an ATS isn’t attainable, which leads many talent teams to believe that they can’t benefit from a data-driven recruitment strategy. They’re wrong! There are data points you can log and track yourself, without having to invest in an expensive ATS.

Here are 4 steps we’ve created to get you started.

Step 1: Start tracking your interview conversion rate

This will allow you to see the number of candidates you need to interview on average to make a hire, as well as segmenting how this differs based on role seniority. For example, PhD positions may have a higher interview to placement conversion rate than an associate professor.

Step 2: Collect feedback at the end of the interview process

Create a short form that has 5-7 questions about the interview process, with a 1-10 score rating, 1 being “poor” and 10 being “excellent”. This can assess multiple data points such as campus visit, interview questions, and overall candidate experience. This information will allow you to refine and improve your interview process based on facts from candidates who have been through the experience, rather than updating it based on a hunch. 

Step 3: Make a note of where your hires are coming from

Understanding the source of your hires can be a great indicator of where you’re getting the most success, but also where you may be wasting money. If a specific supplier or partner hasn’t given you any hires in the last 6 months, you can reassess how you work with them, thus saving you time and money. It’s also useful to implement a routine of asking candidates where they found your job advert for the same reason. 

Step 4: Create monthly reports of all the above

Organising your data is crucial, otherwise, it can be difficult to make any sense of it. Creating monthly reports analysing all the areas you’re measuring can give you clarity on what you want to achieve the following month, as well as indicate areas for improvement. You should also ask your recruitment partner to share their data with you as part of their service. The more data you have, the more streamlined and strategic your recruitment can be.

In conclusion, a data-driven recruitment strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or cost the earth. Instead, it can be a two or three-point analysis to ensure that you can operate in a sustainable and results-driven way.

Do you want the full guide on how to design a data-driven recruitment strategy? Click here to see our comprehensive guide. 

Queen’s University Belfast (Queen’s) is a member of the Russell Group of 24 leading UK research-intensive universities, providing world-class education underpinned by world-class research. We spoke to Victoria Campbell, campaigns marketing manager and part of the strategic marketing communications team to learn more about how the university promotes its research to increase its brand awareness. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Victoria Campbell of Queen’s University Belfast

What is Queen’s approach to marketing campaigns? What kinds of campaigns do you run?

It’s a real mix. We have some campaigns that are always on, particularly for postgrad recruitment and research communication. A lot of activity from a student recruitment point of view is focused on the student cycle that you go through every year. Though it does differ for domestic and international recruitment. The international student recruitment cycle tends to be much longer, often a couple of years.

One of our main campaigns, which we partially run with Academic Positions, is focused on promoting our research around the world. We obviously do this amazing research at Queen’s, but we don’t shout about it very much. This was something that I was tasked with when I started. We already had communications plans in place but we didn’t amplify it further internationally. I started focusing on trying to develop new channels that would promote our research areas and profile our researchers.

What channels do you focus on when you’re promoting your research?

For the paid campaigns, we tend to focus on social media channels. In the last year, I’ve been focused on trying to find other additional channels to help us communicate to an academic audience. We’re trying to put interesting research out there that sparks something in somebody so they click on an ad and read about the research. That’s the focus for us and we always come back to it. We want to put engaging content out to the right audience at the right time. That’s where Academic Positions came in to play for us. Academic Positions gives us an opportunity to profile some of our amazing academics and promote key pieces of research in a way that ties in with the recruitment strategy for the university.

When you talk about the right audience, do you find that there’s a distinction between activities that you do that would be aimed at student recruitment versus employee recruitment?

Definitely. At the brand level, there’s definitely a difference between student recruitment campaigns and brand awareness pieces for an academic audience, for example. Undergraduates and postgraduates are very different audiences with very different information needs and digital touch points throughout their recruitment and student cycle.

Academic audiences are always going to be trickier to reach because no one is just an academic. They do lots of other things. We need to consider what they’re doing and where they’re spending their time online so we can serve them with research that sparks a genuine interest.

When it comes to the academic audience, do you find that social media channels are a useful way to reach them?

At the end of the day, being an academic is a day job. They’re still spending time online on social media channels at some point. If you’re thinking of people as just an audience segment that you’re trying to reach (and not as actual people) then you’re never going to reach them. A lot of undergrad students, for example, spend a lot of time on TikTok or Instagram, but other audiences spend slightly more on Facebook or LinkedIn. Whether it’s an academic audience or a student recruitment focused audience, I think it’s really important to consider social media channels as part of your wider media mix.

Why do you think it’s important for a university to do marketing activities that focus on building a brand and generating awareness?

Awareness filters down. If you look at Queen’s, we have incredible brand awareness around the island of Ireland. But then even in the UK, the awareness is slightly less, and internationally it’s slightly less again. A real focus for Queen’s in the last four or five years has been international recruitment and to do that we need to obviously increase brand awareness. Potential students need to be aware of Queen’s so they consider applying. Brand awareness is a long-term strategy that will continue to impact recruitment and even research funding. It’s not something that can be done as a short term campaign.

How do you measure the ROI on brand awareness activities? Brand awareness is often hard to justify in a budget because the results are a bit intangible.

Brand awareness pieces are definitely difficult to get buy in for at the start. For me, the key is mapping out your KPIs before you start and including KPIs for different touch points as well. I would start with a KPI for the engagement rate or click through rate from the ads. Then the next KPI is on the website, usually the amount of traffic or the time spent on site. Then you always need to go one step further and have some type of measurable action on the page. For example, when we’re promoting research, we will have a research-focused landing page about that particular piece. The main actions that we really want someone to take from that page are either to click to email the academic directly, click through to their profile to look at more research, or click on a link to other pieces of related research. It’s about having some type of quantifiable data to look at at the end and analyse against what investment you’ve put into it.

Zahlreiche Universitäten werfen aktuell einen kritischen Blick auf die geschlechtsspezifische Zusammensetzung ihrer Fakultäten und Mitarbeitenden. So werden Frauen tatsächlich seltener auf eine Professur berufen und sind auch in wissenschaftlichen Forschungsgruppen oft unterrepräsentiert. Aus diesem Grund hinterfragen Recruiter aktuell ihre Personal- und Einstellungsverfahren, in der Hoffnung, den Anteil von Frauen unter ihren Bewerbenden zu erhöhen.

Indem Sie mehr qualifizierte Frauen zur Bewerbung motivieren, werden Sie langfristig zweifellos auch mehr Professorinnen und Forscherinnen an Ihrer Universität beschäftigen können. In diesem Artikel geben wir Ihnen daher einige Tipps und Ratschläge an die Hand, um zukünftig mehr Bewerbungen von Akademikerinnen zu erhalten.

Beseitigen Sie geschlechtsspezifische Vorurteile aus Ihrer Stellenanzeige

Prinzipiell ist sicherlich nicht jede Universität für jeden Menschen gleich attraktiv. Ihre Universität hat einen individuellen Ruf und eine kulturelle Geschichte, die bestimmten BewerberInnen mehr zuspricht als anderen. Aber auch die Stellenanzeige selbst hat einen großen Einfluss auf die Art von AkademikerIn, die sich am Ende um Ihre Stelle bemüht. Wir empfehlen diese vier Maßnahmen, um bewusst Frauen und Menschen mit einer nicht binären Geschlechtsidentität anzusprechen:

1. Verwenden Sie geschlechtsneutrale Sprache

Verschiedene Studien der letzten zehn Jahre haben geschlechtsspezifische Adjektive und deren abschreckende Wirkung auf Frauen untersucht. Man fand heraus, dass Adjektive wie “entschlossen”, “energisch” und “durchsetzungsfähig” oft abschreckend auf Frauen und nicht binäre Personen wirken. Geben Sie Ihren Stellenausschreibungen einen geschlechtsneutralen Ton, indem Sie bestimmte Adjektive bewusst vermeiden. Beschreiben Sie Ihre Stelle und die erforderlichen Fähigkeiten stattdessen mit neutralen Ausdrücken. Verschiedene Webseiten und Apps können den Text Ihrer Anzeige nochmals überprüfen und problematische Sprache eliminieren. Lassen Sie sich von moderner Technologie unterstützen!

2. Limitieren Sie Ihre Anforderungen

In einem Artikel der Harvard Business Review ging Tara Sophia Mohr einer oft zitierten Statistik auf den Grund, laut der sich Frauen nur dann auf Stellen bewerben, wenn sie 100 % der Anforderungen erfüllen. Männer hingegen bewerben sich oftmals, sobald sie 60 % der Ansprüche erfüllen. Sie stellte fest: “Was [Frauen] davon abhält, sich zu bewerben, ist nicht eine falsche Vorstellung von sich selbst, sondern eine falsche Vorstellung vom Einstellungsverfahren.” Die meisten Frauen glauben, dass alle aufgeführten Anforderungen zwingend erforderlich sind.

Es empfiehlt sich daher, nicht alle grundsätzlich wünschenswerten Kenntnisse aufzulisten. Verlangen Sie besser nur jene Fähigkeiten und Qualifikationen, die wirklich unbedingt erforderlich sind. Wenn Sie trotzdem auch wünschenswerte Kenntnisse angeben wollen, sollte klar erkennbar sein, dass diese nicht zwingend erforderlich sind.

3. Erwähnen Sie familienfreundliche Sonderleistungen

Bietet Ihre Einrichtung flexible Arbeitszeiten, Elternurlaub oder Kinderbetreuung auf dem Campus? Vergessen Sie nicht, Sonderleistungen dieser Art in Ihrer Ausschreibung zu erwähnen! Frauen (und Menschen mit Familie) werden sich angesprochen und verstanden fühlen. Wie das Center for Women’s Education an der University of Michigan schreibt, legen Studien nahe, dass Einrichtungen ohne familienfreundliche Leistungen im akademischen Wettbewerb benachteiligt sind. Machen Sie Ihre Universität für Akademikerinnen attraktiver, indem Sie solche Maßnahmen ausdrücklich in der Stellenausschreibung erwähnen.

4. Machen Sie Ihr Engagement für Vielfalt deutlich

Doch nicht nur ein bewusster Fokus auf ein familienfreundliches Beschäftigungsverhältnis macht auf Frauen einen guten Eindruck. Auch Ihr aktiver Einsatz für Vielfalt ist eine wichtige Botschaft mit großer Wirkung. Dieser ausdrückliche Wunsch nach Diversität muss nicht langatmig sein, um potenzielle Bewerbende direkt anzusprechen und Frauen das Gefühl zu geben, gewünscht zu sein. Je konkreter Sie Ihre diesbezüglichen Pläne ausdrücken, desto besser. Wir empfehlen, explizit anzugeben, inwiefern Sie für mehr Vielfalt sorgen wollen, z. B. indem Sie an Ihrer Einrichtung einen gewissen Prozentsatz an Professorinnen anstreben. Dadurch bringen Sie nicht nur Ihre Werte zum Ausdruck, sondern zeigen auch, dass Sie konkrete und messbare Ziele haben.

Posten Sie Ihre offenen Stellen auch auf Social Media

Geschafft! Sie haben mit Hilfe dieser vier Schritte eine attraktive, geschlechtsneutrale Anzeige verfasst. Nun empfehlen wir, diese auch auf Ihren Social Media Kanälen zu veröffentlichen. Soziale Plattformen und Jobbörsen wie LinkedIn sind bei AkademikerInnen traditionell nicht so beliebt, aber eine starke und aktive Präsenz auf Facebook, Instagram und vor allem Twitter ist für das Recruitment von WissenschaftlerInnen unglaublich wichtig. Denn auf diesen Kanälen können Sie nicht nur aktive, sondern auch passive KandidatInnen erreichen.

Da letztere nicht aktiv nach neuen Stellen Ausschau halten, besuchen sie nämlich keine Stellenbörsen. Wenn Sie Ihr Stellenangebot nur dort ausschreiben, erreichen Sie diese wichtige KandidatInnengruppe nicht. Es mag Ihnen verständlicherweise erstmal sinnlos erscheinen, sich auf passive Arbeitssuchende zu konzentrieren. In einem Bericht von Talent Solutions hat LinkedIn jedoch herausgefunden, dass etwa 70 % der weltweiten Arbeitskräfte passive KandidatInnen sind. Und laut Betterteam sagen 80 % der Arbeitgeber, dass Social Recruiting ihnen hilft, eben diese anzusprechen. Social Media ist ein unglaublich wirkungsvolles Mittel, um potenzielle Arbeitssuchende zu erreichen: eben jene AkademikerInnen, die Ihnen entgehen, wenn Sie nur traditionelle Stellenbörsen nutzen.

Darüber hinaus ist eine aktive Präsenz in den sozialen Medien eine großartige Möglichkeit, Ihr Engagement für mehr Diversität in der akademischen Welt zu zeigen. Sie können Bilder von Forscherinnen in Laboren posten, Profile von Eltern, die erzählen, wie sie Beruf und Privatleben miteinander vereinbaren, und Einblicke in die Arbeit Ihrer Kolleginnen oder Studentinnen veröffentlichen. Auf diese Weise können Sie dazu beitragen, sich als attraktiver potenzieller Arbeitgeber für weibliche Arbeitssuchende zu positionieren.  

Nutzen Sie bezahlte Kampagnen

Grundsätzlich gilt: wann immer Sie bewusst weibliche Kandidaten ansprechen wollen (oder eine andere spezifische Zielgruppe), sind bezahlte Kampagnen in den sozialen Medien von unschätzbarem Wert.

Der größte Vorteil von bezahlten Social-Media-Kampagnen besteht darin, dass Ihr Content direkt bei Ihrem bevorzugten Publikum landet. Für Universitäten, die mehr weibliches Personal in einem bestimmten Fachbereich rekrutieren möchten, ist dies von großer Bedeutung. Mit gesponserten Social-Media-Kampagnen können Sie bewusst auswählen, welches Publikum Sie mit Ihren Anzeigen erreichen. Fast alle Recruitment Experten wie Zippia sind sich einig: “Soziales Recruitment bietet die unglaubliche Möglichkeit, bestimmte Personengruppen gezielt auf die verfügbaren Stellen anzusprechen.”

Investieren Sie in Employer Branding und Content Marketing für langfristigen Erfolg

Geschlechtsneutrale Stellenanzeigen und deren Verbreitung in den sozialen Medien können kurzfristig Resultate erzielen. Aber um Ihre Einrichtung dauerhaft als attraktiven Arbeitgeber für Frauen zu positionieren, sollten Sie über die nächste freie Stelle hinaus denken. Der effektivste Weg, dauerhaft mehr weibliche Bewerber anzuziehen, ist die Entwicklung einer langfristigen Strategie, die Employer Branding und Content Marketing umfasst.

Während ein Teil Ihrer Arbeitgebermarke von anderen bestimmt wird (z. B. von Ihren Mitarbeitenden, Studierenden und deren geleisteten Arbeit), können Sie einen Teil durch Ihre Präsentation und Ihr Marketing selbst schaffen. Wenn Sie langfristig mehr Frauen anziehen möchten, sollten Sie darüber nachdenken, wie Sie Ihre Arbeitgebermarke besser auf dieses Ziel abstimmen können. Dr. Graham Little, Partner und Leiter des Bereichs Global Research Leadership beim Personalberatungsunternehmen Perrett Laver, sagt: “Denken Sie über Ihre Webseite, Ihre Werbematerialien und weiteres Begleitmaterial nach – präsentieren Sie sich als das Unternehmen, das Sie sein wollen?”

Content Marketing hilft Ihnen, Ihre Arbeitgebermarke effektiv zu kommunizieren. Durch gezieltes Content Marketing in Form von Blogs, Artikeln oder Beiträgen in sozialen Medien können Sie erklären, warum Vielfalt und Inklusion für Ihren Fachbereich und Ihre Hochschule wichtig sind. Sie können mit Hilfe dieser Inhalte zeigen, dass Geschlechtervielfalt und Inklusion an Ihrer Universität aktiv gefördert und gelebt werden.

Gleichzeitig steigert Content Marketing letztlich das Markenbewusstsein und den Wiedererkennungswert Ihrer Universität an sich, was wiederum dazu beiträgt, talentierte ForscherInnen und AkademikerInnen anzuziehen, einzubinden und langfristig zu halten. Mit regelmäßigen, relevanten Inhalten, die sich an Akademikerinnen richten, erreichen Sie sowohl aktive als auch passive weibliche Arbeitssuchende.

Auch wenn sich passive Stellensuchende vielleicht nicht sofort auf Ihre offene Stelle bewerben, werden sie Stück für Stück mit Ihrer Einrichtung und Ihrer Arbeit vertrauter. Indem Sie mehr Frauen in diese KandidatInnenpipeline aufnehmen, erhöht sich die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass sich in Zukunft mehr Frauen unter Ihren Bewerbenden befinden.