The AGR’s Attraction & Marketing Cross-Sector Special Interest Group Forum

On Tuesday 25th April, Flo (our Campus Relations Manager) and Elisa (our Business Development Manager), presented 3 recent, innovative collaborations with our clients, showcasing how we solved their graduate attraction issues, at the AGR’s Attraction & Marketing Special Interest Forum held at the University of Westminster in London. Helped along by a student headhunter and 2 student society presidents sharing how they help us find the best graduate talent on campus, they presented 3 case studies: hard-to-fill niche technology and engineering roles, technologists for finance and how to improve gender diversity, all using our on-campus student headhunters.

L-R: Flo, Sam, Ravella, Marc-Steeven and Elisa.

Case Study 1: Marc-Steeven on Attracting Graduate Engineers and Technologists for niche roles in Defence Technology & Cyber Security

Marc-Steeven, a final year Computer Science with Business Management student at the University of Birmingham, juggles his course work around his keen involvement in 3 societies, namely the:

– Deeper Life Campus Fellowship: A vibrant group of young Christian students

– Francophile society: A society for people who are French and/or like France

– Wing Chun society: A Kung-Fu club

…and also being an on-campus student headhunter for Sanctuary Graduates.

“This year I helped companies like L-3 TRL Technology hire technology and engineering graduates for their graduate and industrial placement schemes. The first challenge surrounding this task was to make the job adverts look attractive really to students. Another challenge was also to answer people’s questions quickly and to motivate them to apply quickly as well, before they forgot about it.

I post the job campaigns on my own Facebook wall, and in any relevant groups, such as in my course computer science group. I have also taken the initiative create my own sign-up form and I share this amongst friends, in different Facebook groups and in lectures following lecture shout-outs, to collect the contact details of people who are looking for a job, no matter the type or industry. I then add these people to a Facebook group I created especially for students and friends that I’ve come across, who are still actively looking for a graduate job, where I also post all of Sanctuary Graduates’ opportunities.

I also email everyone the job adverts I’ve been given directly. As I am a computer scientist, I coded my own, simple program that send emails to every individual on the contact spreadsheet separately, whenever I receive a new job campaign to advertise.

Networking amongst friends is very efficient because you will already have established a level of trust with them, which makes people less reluctant to apply. Most people are also very happy to help, by sharing the campaign on to their friends if I ask them to, so that I can maximise the adverts’ reach.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being a student headhunter this year. It has taught me a lot about how to manage and support a large social network and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of matching my friends up to graduate roles.”

Case Study 2: Samuel on Technology Graduates for Finance

Sam, a first year student reading Mathematics at Brasenose College Oxford, for whom he also rows competitively,  is the director of marketing for CapitOx, the fastest growing finance and consulting society at Oxford University. Further to CapitOx, Sam is also involved in 2 Oxford-based start-ups, on the University Power-lifting team and is attempting to organise a speaker series in conjunction with both the Oxford Union and the Oxford Women In Business society. We’re not sure how, but on top of all of this Sam also manages to find the time to be an on-campus student headhunter for Sanctuary Graduates.

“I got involved with CapitOx very early on in my University career, having signed up to nearly everything our Fresher’s Fair had to offer – and later that term interviewed for the position of Director of Marketing, which I was lucky enough to get.

Due to the highly academic environment of Oxford, many students leave university with not much of a clue as to what they want to do and how they can get involved with industries that they are interested in. CapitOx was founded to address that market-need 12 years ago and, due to the rising popularity of the financial and consulting industries and the quality of service we provide, it has grown from strength-to-strength boasting over 2,100 members and an equal number of likes on our Facebook Page. Our members come in a fairly even 48:52 gender split over a multitude of degree subjects, not just economics, such as the less obvious Geography, Law and Chemistry.

We regularly host guest-speaker events, and we provide tailored services for our corporate partners to engage with the Oxford student community via formal and informal events. In the past, we have hosted flagship company presentations, CV clinics, pitching competitions, and case study workshops for our clients. We also support our members through the competitive internship and graduate role application process by setting up informal self-help groups, devising and offering our own personalised curricula, but also through our partnership with Sanctuary Graduates, where each of our members has access to their expertise and their teams who prepare and guide students through all the various stages of an application.

As a society working with Sanctuary Graduates we are trusted with advertising the available intern, placement and graduate roles, to our members through our weekly newsletter, targeted emails, face-to-face networking at society events and our social media platforms. Social media is a very effective tool and we’ve found that advertising the urgency of the deadline at the top of the post, has increased our Facebook traffic three-fold. We also ran an email campaign for a grad role recently, with the email title “Many offer, Much Employ”, which followed on from the Doge Meme trend on social media. It turns out that our click rate for that email was up 25%, showing the power of viral social media trends when engaging with students.

Word-of-mouth is another really powerful marketing tool. At CapitOx, we’ve often found peer-to-peer recommendation to be the key; that a friend’s recommendation is stronger than any post or email that you could possibly see, and as such creates a stronger tie between the individual and the opportunity. One of the greatest challenges is to make your brand known and student societies are often the best way to spread the word, as many students are most easily swayed by their peers and friends.

Although the campaign for Schroders was a technology campaign, the beauty of working with a society like CapitOx is that we are open to anyone, studying any degree background – not just finance or economics students. A lot of our members don’t study anything finance related, but they are simply interested in pursuing a career in finance. We have a lot of members studying STEM degrees, such as computer science and engineering, who are interested in the technology opportunities within finance available through Sanctuary Graduates that we advertise.”

Case Study 3: Ravella on improving gender diversity – How to deliver a balanced gender split in your graduate talent pool

Ravella, a final year student at King’s College London studying towards a BSc in Business Management, is involved mainly with the KCL Women In Finance Society but was also treasurer for the KCL Asset Management Society last year. She has also been involved with charitable societies such as Teach First. This year, Ravella helped us by using her female networks to improve the graduate gender balance for companies including KPMG, M&G Investments, Baillie Gifford and Lazard Financial Advisory.

“I founded the society in my first year of university after noticing that finance recruitment events were male dominated. I was president in my first and second year but I am now co-president. The aims of the society are to improve awareness of the opportunities that are available to women in the financial sector. We do this by hosting talks with companies such as Deloitte, EY, PwC, Lazard and Capgemini. We have hosted case study session and skills workshops too. Next year, the new presidents will be looking at hosting more informal events such as a LinkedIn photo shoot, for example. The number of members we have is not cumulative and is refreshed to 0 at the start of each year but we have around 150-200 members this year and we have over 500 likes on Facebook. This has been growing at an increasing rate since the society was founded in 2015.

We normally send out information regarding opportunities in our fortnightly newsletter and we also advertise through our Facebook page. Personally, I think that social media is the best place to advertise opportunities because we can pay extra for targeted advertising if needed. Students seem to pay more attention to advertisements on social media due to the amount of time they spend on it. We also sometimes speak to different university departments and ask them to send out emails because they can reach out to students that may not have traditionally joined our society.

I believe this type of networking works, as there is an element of trust amongst friends. In addition, students often have first hand experience of working in these roles from internships, and so they can provide great insight into a company.”

Thank you to all our headhunters who took time away from revision to help us with our presentation and good luck with your exams! 🙂