How to conceptualize B-School and Engineering campus engagements for enhancing employer brand equity

Every campus recruiter across Business Schools, Engineering Colleges, and other Graduate Colleges want to enhance their employer brand equity in the minds of students as they are in a war for talent due to skill shortages, disruptive technologies, and volatile market conditions. 

They do it through campus engagements that range from leadership to informal alumni sessions, case study competitions to online quizzes and hackathons, and creative gamified digital assets to on-ground in-depth interactions with students under the umbrella of employer branding. 

It is imperative for every HR, Marketing & Branding team, as co-owners of the employer brand, to understand a few nuances of the game before sitting in the driver seat. They need to dive into,

• their EVP - Employee Value Proposition
• characteristics of the target audience
• various options and solutions that will work for them
• ROI measurement metrics

Let us look at them one-by-one.

First, understand your EVP. It is critical and the first step for any team. It defines how you'd like to be perceived as an employer. It helps you in creating your communication strategy around strong pillars for your company. 

Let's think of a great brand, in your opinion, what is it that makes you like it? I'm sure the element that stands out to you will be consistent in that brand's communication at every touchpoint. Hence, before starting to conceptualize campus activities and engagements aimed at employer branding, you need to understand your brand. Everything else will follow. 

Hindustan Unilever builds excellent brands and genuinely cares about making a difference, and this is at the core of its employer brand and EVP. They develop leaders for themselves and the world. HUL LIME (Lessons in Marketing Excellence), the poster boy of B-School campus engagements, truly reflects this in its structure, content, and marketing campaigns, starting from the name itself. In their interactions on the ground with students, they showcase how brands go from zero to great. And their cases/problems always revolve around their brands and how to grow them holistically. They even take up cases on different national issues like sustainable living, LGBT, etc. during the grand finale. And, because of this, it has continuously been voted as the Most Prestigious B-School Competition in Dare2Compete Awards for the last two years by B-School students.

All of this ensures that the end-user gets deep insights into how the company works and what opportunities they will get if they work in that company. 

Second, understand your target audience. A B-School student will behave differently than an engineering graduate who will, in turn, be very different than an arts & science graduate. They all will have diverse backgrounds, aspirations, and thought process, and will be at a different phase of their academic or professional journey. The definition of the generation gap is ever-changing and subjective; nowadays, a difference of 3 years makes you question your communication strategy. Hence, conceptualize campus engagements that are separate for each target segment, or a common one that accounts for their differences.

Today's talent, labelled Generation Z, is focused on continuous learning and improvement along with instant gratification. You need to be crystal clear in your messaging - what your brand stands for and the benefits your brand promises to deliver. Here the brand can be a company, a product, or an engagement.

HUL LIME is perfect for the B-School audience. However, they may have to conceptualize separate campus engagements for Engineering students and maybe another for graduate colleges. On the other hand, TATA Crucibles - Campus edition, a general knowledge quiz, is open to all students across domains and disciplines as they factor in the content relevant for all age groups. However, to target only the coding enthusiasts in the engineering domain, they crafted the TATA Crucible hackathon. 

Third, your options for engagements and making it unique and differentiated. It's linked to the second aspect of understanding your target audience. Various elements to be considered are;

• Structure and its construct
• Rewards
• Content
• Branding and Digital Outreach

You must think through all of them separately.

Structure and its construct - Everyone wants to conceptualize campus engagements, not in line with what others are doing. And, majorly, all of them want this aspect of the competition to be changed and made unique. The truth is that there is only so much that you can do with this component and its sub-elements.

The flow of the competition should have 3 to 4 different stages/rounds in an ideal scenario. More than this increases the complexity of the engagement and makes it lengthy and time-consuming. Participation is always inversely proportional to the time investment. Plus, more prolonged the engagement more will be its chances of losing steam.

Another important question that comes up is whether to open up a competition to only a few campuses or a broader set. Majorly this is driven by internal HR strategy on who they hire and from where. Making it open to a more comprehensive set of campuses and students makes your employer brand benefit in the lateral hiring space as well. Why not take advantage of this when the cost implication is marginal or zero. Plus, this also opens up doors to new campuses, should a recruiter need to churn their existing set. We've seen great examples of this in competitions like PepsiCo Dare to Do More where winners came in from non-target campuses and have taken up full-time roles in PepsiCo.

Whatever you do, this may or may not be a great differentiator. The same goes for rewards unless you are offering them something tangible, going beyond prizes in cash or kind. Something that they will be able to live with for the rest of their lives happily and proudly. Like, Emerging Leader, Young Leader, 30 Under 30, etc. A LinkedIn profile mention adds to the employer brand and gives you brand ambassadors while adding an aspirational twist to things.

Content is unique for every company and brand. How you give that to the participant and what you want them to do with that changes the game. OLA did this nicely when they gave real problems as a case study that students have experienced and asked them to work on that problem as Program Managers. This experience gave participants an insight into what they will be doing while working for OLA.

Flipkart gave thousands of predefined images to engineering students as part of their GRiD challenge. Students had to leverage this data-set to build a model for Object Localization in images. It's designed to bring out the Data Scientist in them, where their Machine Learning and AI capabilities were put to the ultimate test.

Aditya Birla Group, through Stratos, a B-School Competition, offers students the experience of a lifetime through a business simulation game that makes them think through different aspects of managing a company as a CEO in a competitive scenario with a few others as CEOs of other companies. The decision of one team/person impacts the decision of the other team, which makes it attractive as they need to think on their feet. It's an intellectual multiplayer video game in an actual business environment. 

Branding is another distinctive element to think through, that should communicate your EVPs and brand promises and should make the engagement unique in the minds of students. You need to make your designs, messaging, collaterals, etc. attractive and need to ensure that every touchpoint with the target audience is an opportunity to make a mark in their minds - website, social media, mailers, and other outreach channels. Every interaction with your proposed hire needs to be smooth. 

You need to push your brand where your target audience is, digitally, to hit them multiple times before they notice your brand and engage with it. Think through and conceptualize one X-Factor that will make your campus engagements go viral - a social media campaign, gamification to involve more and more students, digital showcases of your outstanding employees through articles and videos, etc. You may not even know at the time of conceptualization that this campaign is your X-Factor, but try and think of different aspects to engage the audience.

Even without doing much with the other elements, branding and digital outreach, single-handedly, might put you in a different light to gain the mindshare. Going digital and virtual is the way forward.

Fourth, return on investment (ROI). Here the investment is not only money but time and resources involved to conceptualize and execute campus engagements. It is critical to measure success, but it should not be done only through numbers. Measure the complete funnel.

• Outreach - How many students would have heard about your brand? To participate or not is their choice, but at least they heard about you and would remember you.
• Registrations - How many students showed interest in engaging with your brand? Shows how aspirational your brand is.
• Participation/Submission - How many students submitted or participated in the preliminary round? This number is a highly engaged set and knows a bit deeper about your brand. Just going through the case would give them an idea. 
• Buzz on Campus - Not numbers but tangible qualitative feedback from your interns or direct contacts on campus. Are students talking about your brand on campus? Don't expect a magic wand in season 1 of your engagement, but building a buzz on campus ensures that your brand grows organically. 
• Hired Students through this engagement - If this engagement resulted in hires, you'd be able to see the direct reduction on other resources that are directly involved in hiring.
• Innovative Ideas and Business Problem Solutions - This medium also generates creative and innovative ideas that organizers can take forward for implementation. Thousands of students, brightest minds, working to provide you a solution/idea. 
• Feeds to your hiring strategy - Did the engagement give any cues on your next HR strategy - Which campuses to go to - the churn? What kind of students to hire? And savings on your time, money, and resources.

There isn't a straightforward answer to crafting a masterpiece of campus engagement. However, thinking through all the aspects is the first step. In these testing times of lockdown, when everything is going digital, companies and brands need to open up and try non-traditional channels for their campus hiring strategy, including campus engagements under employer branding. 

Finally, let me put the salesman in me at the forefront. Being the leader in this space, Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete)is best poised to work with companies and brands to craft their yearly campus engagement footprint across domains - Business, Engineering, Arts & Science, etc. We have 1 million active users across 10,000+ colleges with 75,000 listed student opportunities to date. Our credibility comes from our diverse clientele - Hindustan Unilever (HUL), PepsiCo, Aditya Birla Group, Reliance Industries, Texas Instruments, PwC, KPMG, Asian Paints, etc. - and our array of services, products, and solutions that are second-to-none and are exhaustive to cater to all your needs across segments.

Godspeed! Stay Safe.