Recruiting Intelligence

Is it all about the enrollment numbers? Hitting “the number” is the driving force behind so much effort. So much pressure. A growing number of US universities now use education agents. And now, more universities are evaluating agent aggregators. Many have contracts in place with aggregators already and we hope those early adopters take a squinty-eyed, very close look at the results of those contracts.

How many applications? How many enrolled? And the quality of those students throughout the process. Are they succeeding academically?

If you are not familiar, check out our post and a recent (Dec 2022) lively ICEF panel discussion here. Hitting you in the face is a changing student landscape, the pressure to hit your enrollment number, and the agent aggregators who may be able to help, and quickly. Also in your face: the question of trust and integrity.

Some institutions have a hard enough time outsourcing their recruitment to individual agents, even those with third-party accreditation like AIRC. And beyond education agents who also use subagents, agent aggregators are farming out recruitment processes on a massive scale around the world using online platforms to scale the work rapidly. Questions arise as to how well any particular subagent is familiar with your institution, much less whether they are vetted for integrity.

Smart institutions want to know who’s representing their brand on their behalf. Fact: there’s just not enough transparency right now in this student recruitment system.

To be clear, we are in favor of agents. Human agents with whom you can connect directly, vet their talent, train, and guide. Intead has been a strategic partner to AIRC for more than a decade and our team fully supports ICEF’s efforts to bring enrollment leaders together with education agents from around the world. Both organizations push for clearly articulated best practices.

For more insights, check out our webinar with AIRC about the State of the Field. Our Intead Plus subscribers also have access to our ebook on University-Agent Partnership Trend Data and our Agent Management ebook all in our resource library available to all.

What we all know is that the system is less than perfect and students lose out when universities and agents are not doing their jobs with integrity.

Education agents, when brought into the fold as a partner, can be incredibly valuable. The key: partnerships, as in humans supporting other humans. 

Like any relationship, a meaningful partnership is built not bought. Is this even possible with the aggregator trend? Scale brings problems and when folks are lazy (and human beings tend to be), scale can bring disaster.

Look at the agent aggregator model from a simple business process point of view. If a company has 7,000 vetted partner sales offices, that company would need a robust credentialing team to monitor and control for quality. They would have a defined process for maintaining a certain quality of sales office staff hiring, training, work processes, and regular review of results delivered. Consider the level of effort hospitals go through to confirm the credentials and qualifications of their clinicians and physicians who have admitting privileges.

As you consider signing up with an agent aggregator, we highly recommend you ask tough questions about their staffing process, the vetting, and the monitoring. For institutions sharing their brand reputation with these outsource partners, it is buyer beware. Like super beware.

If you are not finding the quality control measures in place on the agent aggregator’s side, that means the quality control must be staffed on your side. Which then starts to beg the question: what are you paying for? Answer: the broad, global connection network. Keep in mind, that is something you can develop yourself in a way that is more targeted and more sustainable over the long term. Many institutions with thousands of international students started that process years ago and rely on their network today.

Not sure how to evaluate or where to start? Drop us a note.

Some of these aggregators are growing fast and coming on strong. They are shaking up the education market and making trusted agencies nervous. There are simply too many subagents operating in anonymity. Anonymity creates opportunities for questionable behavior (and we are being nice with our choice of words here).

 As we all broaden our scope to avoid the US domestic enrollment cliff and fold new target regions into our recruitment strategies, agents have an important role to play. Read on for 3 valuable tips on how to get the most out of this potentially beneficial partnership. Hint: it all comes back to developing trusting relationships with fellow, reliable humans.

Let’s be honest. We’re not all people people. And we’re not all data nerds. Or content creators. The point: we need a team with varied talents to cover all the tasks required to run a successful enrollment management process.

One of the common areas we explore with our clients (it also comes up during conference discussions frequently): “What is the best staffing structure for student recruitment and enrollment processes?” And we have some basic analysis available to help you get this conversation started in your own shop.

To help your team (read: provost and VP of finance) understand why you need the full complement of skills, we’ve developed an at-a-glance info sheet that shows the skill sets needed at each phase of the admissions funnel. It’s pretty interesting to approach it from this perspective. And it’s pretty important that you do.

We’ll be presenting our enrollment staffing perspective as part of a session at the AGB (Association of Governing Boards) conference this April in San Diego with Brad Farnsworth, principal of Fox Hollow Advisory and former senior VP at American Council on Education, and Gretchen Bataille, president of GMB Consulting Group who also served in leadership roles at University of North Texas, University of North Carolina system, and at American Council on Education. University trustees and presidents gather every year at AGB to identify best practices for growth.

We’ll also be presenting with Karin Fischer, senior writer at Chronicle of Higher Education, and Ahmad Ezzeddine, vice president of academic student affairs and global engagement at Wayne State University, at the AIEA conference in DC in February. If you’d like to meet at either of these events, please drop us a note.

The annoying answer to the question about staffing structure is: “It depends.”

That's also a legit answer because institutions fall into different categories. As a simple example, consider an institution seeking an incoming class of 1,000 students vs another seeking 10,000 students. These institutions clearly need different reporting structures to process different volumes of marketing recruiting and inquiry nurturing, much less application processing and student orientation.

Nevertheless, there are common skills needed, from people skills to data crunching skills. And with enrollment offices typically run by an efficient crew (read that as skeleton teams) most staff are expected to wear many (or all) the hats: marketer, analyst, tech guru, travel agent, career counselor, social butterfly, academic genie, social media manager, digital marketer, and even coffee maker.

Sound familiar at your institution? Even if a Venn diagram from the latest psychological assessment shows your team of two (or four) has significant overlap among disparate personality traits, it’s impossible to create the kind of student cohort your institution aims for by asking just a few people to do it all.

We see it all the time. And it’s tough because no institution has all the resources they need. But the smart ones know how to build the right staff structure and partner relationships that will yield great results.

Our enrollment staff structure info sheet will be available for free to our blog subscribers for a limited time. Or, join Intead Plus and your team can access this and all our other Intead Index student recruitment essentials any time the need arises (annual budgeting, new team member training, etc.).

To get your free “International Enrollment from a Marketer’s Point of View,” read on.

Today, we start a new occasional series with our Recruiting Intelligence Blog calling on the expertise of our colleagues in the field and sharing their views with you. Many of you know our first “View from My Seat” writer and worked with him in his former role as Vice President for Global Engagement at the American Council on Education. Brad Farnsworth now runs Fox Hollow Advisory helping institutions develop and execute international strategy.

We are thrilled to share his counsel to SIOs as universities around the world continue to grapple with how the pandemic has changed their approach to global partnerships, student services, student enrollment, and overall academic business models.

Be sure to sign up for our AIRC-hosted webinar with Technion Israel Institute of Technology presenting “Shifting Student Perspectives: Digital Marketing Now” — Free to AIRC members and $45 for non-members. Register HERE. (If your institution is not an AIRC member, hit us up for a code and we'll see about getting you past the velvet ropes.)

Read on for Brad’s counterintuitive recommendations for all of our SIO colleagues.

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…