Recruiting Intelligence

This is going to be a long post with some really valuable insights. We hope you’ll grab some coffee and take time to skim through. This is important to you and your bottom line. You’ll want to share this with specific colleagues with a few highlights based on where the priorities are at your institution…

A word to the wise: people often remember most how you behave in a crisis.

The world of international student recruitment faces consistent challenges. At times they are huge, recall 9/11, and other times they are as small as the annoying intermittent WiFi access at your student recruitment fair in Istanbul.

The past decade has seen a range of significant challenges to your recruitment marketing plans and those challenges have been due to largely unanticipated causes.

• 2008 brought us the global financial crisis. How bad was it? For a brief period, banks were too afraid to lend to each other!
• 2015 brought us a new level of anti-immigrant rhetoric out of the US as the 2016 election cycle ramped up.
• Not long after that, the new White House administration delivered the travel ban (aka the Muslim ban) among other changes to visa approvals.
• Now the immediate and unexpected challenge of the Coronavirus coupled with an extension of the travel ban to a spate of new countries including Nigeria.

To quote a good friend and colleague, Angel Ahmed, CEO of GNET, “When things get challenging, we don’t get frustrated, we get focused.”

So, what’s an enrollment professional to do when unexpected and significant challenges are disrupting your marketing plans and your results? You’ve probably already given these challenges a lot of your time and thinking, but we know a second (or third) set of eyes is always helpful. Read on for ten concrete recommendations to focus you, Intead style.

A serious question for you: what should your recruitment team and The Avengers have in common?

We hope your answer isn’t fashion sense, although if you’ve been wearing capes to any student fairs recently, that’s certainly one way to attract attention!

The Avengers know the secret to a powerful team: skill diversity. As you build your own roster of recruitment superheroes, it is important to consider the specific “superpowers” needed to be effective at each stage of the recruitment funnel. And yes, each stage is different. Ensuring that you have the right staff member in the right place at the right time will be paramount to achieving your enrollment goals.

Having just returned from the ICEF and AIRC conference conversations in December, we feel compelled to consider your staffing needs. Do you have the right people in the right seats with the right skills?

So, what are these superpowers, you ask?

We’ve created a helpful infographic to guide you through team roles and needed skills at each stage of the funnel. Use it to assess your own team structure and identify areas for professional development. Keep this funnel in mind as you draft job descriptions and make hiring decisions and remember to consider both the hard and soft skills new team members may bring to the table.

Avengers assemble! And read on…

Let’s talk about how your institution seals the deal with non-traditional students. It is all about the planning and execution – both the marketing, and the heavy lifting that happens before the marketing. You are going to need the goods in place before the campaigns roll so that you are able to deliver on the marketing promises made.

Briefly Reviewing the Opportunity

This is our third post in our three-part series about students who have Some College, No Degree (SCND) non-traditional students. In last week’s blog post, we discussed the segment within these 36 million Americans who are most likely to return to school—Potential Completers.

Now, just because they have a high likelihood of re-enrolling, doesn’t mean they actually do it. But, since the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s original report in 2014, about 940,000 SCND students have since re-enrolled and have completed their degrees. That is roughly the same number of international students currently studying in the US – another valuable student segment we love to talk about.

There’s the projection that non-traditional students will double the enrollment growth of traditional students by 2022. This is why, a number of years back, the Intead team applied our targeted marketing research and execution skills to this growing segment. Our aim: position your institution to take advantage of the trends that matter. You've grabbed our non-traditional student marketing ebook from us by now, right? 

A Challenging Reality

We all know academic industries are slow to change and move. Convening the right team and presenting them with the data that supports change is how things get done. The team at Intead is often sought to facilitate that transition and help set a cogent and actionable plan for student enrollment growth...based on data.

There are many factors to consider as you evaluate how to maintain or expand your enrollment numbers in the face of significant market shifts. It is all about how you plan and execute.

Over the next two weeks, the Intead team, Patricia, Alicia, Stephanie and Ben, are attending a number of our industry’s major conferences: TABS, ICEF and AIRC. We will be sharing data on international and domestic student mobility at the high school and university levels and the digital marketing tools that can truly change your institution’s position in the competitive market – from peer-to-peer platforms, to artificial intelligence, and the ever shifting pay-per-click campaigns that engage your target audiences.

Developing an Actionable Plan

So, about those planning and execution tips to help you enroll non-traditional students AND a preview of all the market research we are about to drop.

Want to get a jump on it? Reach out: info@intead.com and Read On…

Despite the dire headlines throughout the academic industry addressing the "looming crisis" and the excellent research on the topic from so many great sources (thank you Chronicle of Higher Ed), the availability of college-ready students is growing at a rapid pace.

How could we say such a thing!!??!?

Everyone knows the pool of high school students is going to fall off a cliff after 2024-2025, right? The demographic trends lines have shown this for years!!! The big academic marketing and analytics firms (you know who we are talking about) are pushing their predictive analytics services as your holy grail and so many institutions are buying into it.

Not so fast! Please, not so fast.

Welcome to our three-part series on Non-Traditional Student Recruitment. You will want to share this one with some key colleagues at your institution. There’s a theme to this series: Be Nimble!

Research and analytics must lead to action and results. And 36 million potential students could be evaluating your institution right now. Do you have the right advisers and team to help you be nimble and capitalize on the opportunity?

A recent comment from a highly experienced senior procurement officer regarding her institution’s contract with Intead, “There is no other company that could do this project for us.”

Listen to the Voice of the Customer

A time of change does require expenditure. Knowing where and how to spend is the key. The big question: Will the board-level advice you are paying for pay off for you?

Answer the bigger question that is actually going to improve your enrollment numbers. It is a question that your audience (students) are asking and you need to be able to answer:

“I want to move from here to there. Have others like me been able to do that?”

Read on for the clear direction for enrollment growth. It is not simple, but it is the future…

Let’s talk about student recruitment without the data for a change. Let’s talk about the underpinnings of this human experience of recruitment. Stay with me here.

Why are we doing this work in the first place?

The cynical among us point to the economics: we recruit students to get their tuition dollars. Ok, this is true. Faculty must be paid to get them to deliver education services. They actually get pretty adamant about this. And administrators need to get paid to keep the operation going.

Bigger thinkers among us believe education fosters cultural understanding. And global education fosters cross-cultural understanding. All this education helps build stronger economies (think jobs) and more peaceful times. 

Personal growth and communal growth.

And how in the world will this blog intro bring us to our favorite topic: student recruitment? Trust me and read on...

Everyone feels stress on the job. Recruitment and admissions teams are feeling it too, according to a recent story from Inside Higher Ed.

In Inside Higher Ed’s 2019 Admission Officers Survey, 336 admissions leaders weighed in, and the majority admitted they were concerned about filling their classes, especially in a timely manner. And not just a majority, but a super majority.

While we may wish for the stressless job, we knew what was in store when we took on this kind of work. And nothing relieves stress like the ability to point to a plan. Yet, the plan forward has so many options. Which ones are best for your institution? Where is the best ROI? The annoying answer: It depends.

Come see us at the AIRC Annual Conference in Miami in December where we will be offering a 3 hour pre-conference workshop on all the latest trend data and the actionable plans that help you move forward. Email us if you'd like to set up a meeting between Dec. 8 - 13 (ICEF + AIRC events).

So, let’s talk right now about the pros and cons of the various plans that lead to enrollment success.