Recruiting Intelligence

In last week's post, we gave you an international student's user perspective of LinkedIn’s University Finder tool (thank you for all the positive feedback by the way). 

For those of you wanting more digital marketing perspective... Join us in Miami at the ICEF pre-conference Global Marketing Seminar for Education Institutions. We hope to see you there.

This week, we check back in with our international marine engineer, Steven, to see what is driving his decisions about graduate study. Steven is looking for international and US universities with a master’s program in engineering and project management. His LinkedIn search yielded an intriguing list of institutions. In this post, we share Steven’s thoughts on the functionality of the tool and the effectiveness of the universities’ LinkedIn pages that he visited.

Bottom Line: International students seeking to study abroad have far too many choices and need tools like LinkedIn to narrow the field and focus their decision making. Your institution needs to be represented well here to take advantage of the free marketing LinkedIn is providing. Little known universities stand to gain the most.

LinkedIn dominates online professional relationship building. LinkedIn creates and retains connections, provides transparency into professional backgrounds and accomplishments.  Professional recruiting is heavily influenced by LinkedIn.  An now LinkedIn is starting to build a direct connection to universities, alumni and even university rankings.  What does that mean for your activities as university administrators, admission officers and alumni offices?

During the winter break, I found more time to read lots of books and magazines. Let me share one headline that stuck with me.  "Average is Over." It's the title of economist Tyler Cowen's book about the future of our economy. But beyond the title of this book, this theme was prevalent in many of the books and articles I read. Competition is intensifying across all product and service categories, and product cycles are decreasing. Higher education is no exception to that increased competitive environment.  And you, the admissions and marketing departments, stand at the forefront of that competition for qualified and motivated students.