There are two main types of student recruitment: agent based and direct based recruitment.
Universities typically have the following problems when doing direct to student recruitment. I am going to go through each of the problems and suggest solutions
1) Current system is working – low hanging fruit
2) Overwhelm
3) Silos – tech and different departments
4) Lack of tools
5) Student Recruitment Period is Long
6) Challenges to make changes
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1) Current system is working – low hanging fruit
Right now if the recruitment and marketing team of the university does nothing, there are going to be a baseline of students applying, just by default because the university exists and there are already a stream of students applying.
The first problem is that the current system is kind of working. There are students applying and enrolling. It’s true that there are going to be a number of students who are discovering your university and applying directly. It might be that they have friends who studied there, or they did their own research and applied directly.
This is the low hanging fruit, and shouldn’t distort your thinking. As you do more student recruitment, it is not going to be so easy as these students who are already applying. Just the same as gold mining, some activities might not work and might not generate any more students, it is inevitable, some activities might generate a huge stream of new students. Failure at some part of the marketing process is inevitable, but it should be managed through tracking of metrics and learning important lessons.
At the same time there are many students who would like to apply but do not know about the option of your university. There is no way of knowing how many students can be attracted and the quality of these students.
This is basically a hidden problem that many people don’t realise, and it is related to mindset that is hard to see.
2) Overwhelm
One of the main challenges for universities is that things are so busy that it is hard to spare time to try new things and make changes to the system. There are often many more new students applying but the recruitment team are usually using the same systems. There are usually an endless stream of students asking questions and trying to call the university. That means there is often very little free time to think of the bigger picture and how to make things more efficient and grow the outreach and improve the system.
I know because we have been in this situation before. Especially at peak times when there are so many students applying. I hope that this guide can help to solve this problem by sharing some of the things that we’ve learnt.
The end result is actually not that complicated and is quite simple.
3) Silos – tech and different departments
Student recruitment is a process that takes place over a period of time and has a few different parts and needs a number of different people to be involved in it. It is important that everyone involved understands the overall system. One of the problems is that individuals are not able to make many changes to the overall system because it needs someone else to change it. For example often the tech platform is managed by someone else, and the recruitment or marketing team are not able to make changes to the website. It is really important that there is a leader who can oversee the whole process and that everyone is aligned on the same page and can understand the different process and what is needed. I hope this guide can help a bit to see these issues.
4) Lack of tools
This point is related to 3. Another problem that universities have is that there is a lack of tools available. Even if they want to make a change there is no way to do it. I am going to go into all the different tools and try to provide the resources to show how it can be done. It starts with 1) having a model, 2) educating everyone involved, 2) metrics tracking so the system can be designed and improved, and tools available to manage each part of the process.
5) Student Recruitment Period is Long
Another problem that universities have is that the student recruitment process is long. The average student takes about 3-8 months from when they first do research and then apply to a university. They will research on many different platforms. There is a time lag between first doing marketing and seeing a result. Many universities do not realise this and so they are reluctant to do some kind of activity that may or may not see a return in the future.
The solution to this is to understand the overall process very deeply, effectively track the metrics and and have effective short term goals, and milestones and methods to evaluate the effectiveness of different recruitment strategies at different stages of the funnel.
6) Challenges to make changes
Another challenge that universities have is that it is hard for them to make changes. It is hard for individuals to make changes and changes can take time to get approval from the different stakeholders.
I think this is the perception but not the reality. The first and most important way to make changes is to understand the process deeply, and track the metrics effectively. When this is in place then tweaks and changes can be made to improve and develop the system. It’s not necessary to make any big changes at the start. First an understand, and then secondly small tweaks and changes.
