Recruiting Intelligence

Here it is. Delivered fresh to your mailbox. Another exciting edition of the Intead Index, one in a series of indices that provides you with all of the information you need to make informed decisions.

We will cover a variety of information sources, marketing and technology services international university admissions and marketing departments purchase or use regularly. We will publish the lists regularly on the blog over the next few months. We will be publishing a compilation of these lists on a yearly basis. While we'd like to think that our research is comprehensive, we know that there might be service providers we inadvertently overlooked. That's where you, our loyal readers, come into the picture.  We welcome your comments and additions to the lists. Feel free to use the provided link to share your feedback. 

If you are a regular reader of this blog you might have noticed how I fondly reminisce about my experience as an admission counselor. I spent three years working at my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis. This was my first real job so the experience was pivotal in shaping me as a budding professional. I can appreciate firsthand how the last few months have been an utter whirlwind for admission counselors. From a winter spent in the depths of file reading to a spring spent trying to enroll all of the admitted students, there has been little time to breathe, let alone spend time reading this blog. So today I want to point out some blog posts you might have missed over the last few months.

Five Trends to Watch in Higher Education, published this month by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a management consulting group, has some dramatic and valuable things to say. You may recall that last week, we presented our thoughts on another BCG report in our Intead Insight: Can Millennials Change Marketing Forever? Uh, yes (eyeroll). We certainly consider both of these BCG reports worthy your attention. 

In this latest BCG report, the authors talk about influential forces rather than trends, saying that "five forces are reshaping Higher Education." Today, we'll review these forces and offer up a few of the report's charts that we find the most informative and intriguing.

Would you like to increase your accessibility to prospective international students?  Would you like to increase your own productivity? We will show you two ways to be more accessible to students in a controlled and organized way.  

"How Millennials Are Changing the Face of Marketing Forever -- The Reciprocity Principle" is a research piece published by BCG (Boston Consulting Group), a management consulting firm. While the report reviews how millennials interact with a range of consumer brands and products, there are valuable lessons for those of us in academia. After all, this age group is pretty heavily represented in our classrooms, hallways, and registrars. Let's see what we can learn from BCG.

We'd like to proudly introduce a new content source for you-- Intead Index-- a set of indices that provides you with all of the information you need to make informed decisions. We will cover a variety of information sources, marketing and technology services international university admissions and marketing departments purchase or use regularly. We will publish the lists regularly on the blog over the next few months. We will be publishing a compilation of these lists on a yearly basis for you to download and share with your team. While we'd like to think that our research is comprehensive, we know that there might be service providers we inadvertently overlooked. That's where you, our loyal readers, come into the picture.  We welcome your comments and additions to the lists. Feel free to use the provided link to share your feedback. 

In honor of the U.S. Federal Tax Filing Deadline this week, we dedicate this Intead Insight to another federal agency with filing requirements – the US Immigration and Customs Service and the SEVIS system that many of you know all too well (and wish you didn't).

We all know that the visa process plays a significant role in the university enrollment process. We highly recommend you listen to our podcast with former State Department Officer Tony Edson for valuable insights into the State Department's Visa Services.

Here at Intead we don't spend a lot of time tooting our own horn. We're so busy implementing client projects while analyzing trends in international higher education recruiting and marketing, digital marketing and social media, there's little time for patting ourselves on the back. Let alone shouting our succeses from the rafters.  

Your work, like ours, is important stuff. And all that stuff is valued by the folks we reach, our target audiences: the students, researchers, and other industry professionals who benefit from what our organizations do. These are our customers.

So when good customer feedback happens, we have the opportunity to use it as objective justification for the value of our work. Testimonials represent authentic, reliable and sharable content to let our customers hear the message: "Hey, these guys met my needs; exceeded my expectations."

Building bridges between cultures and achieving cultural connectedness has been simplified through technology. What once required face-to-face meetings and books on the subject can now be achieved through the power of video and social media.

Many of us work to engage international students and connect with them in a way that feels familiar, comfortable and culturally relevent, but none of us are doing it in quite the creative and talented way as Jessica Beinecke. As the creator of Crazy Fresh Chinese and BaiJie Lalala, Ms. Beinecke is a well known celebrity among Chinese teenagers and young adults for the way in which she explains American popular culture in a relatable, entertaining way. And we are proud to announce that Ms. Beinecke will be joining us as a keynote speaker at the 2014 Intead Global Marketing Conference.  

Watch this VIDEO to learn more about Ms. Beinecke: