Recruiting Intelligence

Before we even had our coffee this morning, members of the Intead team had already texted with spouses about children’s forgotten school lunches, communicated with dog walkers on Facebook messenger, and answered Slack messages from each other. Something tells me your morning didn’t look all that different from ours. We are living in an era of instant communication.

We have come to expect that we’ll be able to reach folks quickly and get the info we need wherever and whenever we want to. So, it’s no wonder that we’re seeing the rise of “conversational marketing”—and that your prospective students expect you to keep up with the times.

Conversational marketing is “feedback driven” marketing that relies on artificial intelligence, or bots, to communicate with consumers—or in our case, students.

Here's the important question: Will your institution be at the forefront? A fast follower? Or trying desperately to catch up?

Upcoming Educational Opportunities

How about a FREE PASS to our next Intead Plus webinar? 

Wed, Nov 7th at 11AM EST we will have an important discussion: "What's a Muslim Student to Think?" with our friend and guest speaker Wajahat Ali whom I was first introduced to at the 2015 AIEA conference when he keynoted the luncheon. As a blog subscriber, we want you to experience the value of subscribing to our newest service. Please join us for the webinar as our guest.

And we would be remiss to not mention the AIRC conference and our full-day workshop on all things international student recruiting. December 5 in Weston, FL. Join veteran recruiters and marketers and hone your marketing plan using our worksheets. Get the scoop here. 

Chatbot Info, Let's Get Into It...

So about those Chatbots...are they sounding too futuristic or difficult to implement? It’s not as intimidating as it sounds, and it’s changing the marketing game. You can make this happen for your institution. Here's what you need to know...

Have you heard all the buzz about all the latest tech solutions in international recruitment? Honestly, we'd be shocked if you hadn't – the buzz seems to be everywhere. 

This week we're taking a look at emerging trends in recruitment technologies (starting with a quick look at critical changes to the WeChat platform). PIE News recently released the nominees for the PIEoneer of the Year award for Digital Innovation in technology and we wanted to call attention to a couple of our favorite nominees – as well as a couple of other recent innovations. 

As you look critically at each of the tools we are considering this week, you'll want to ask, "How well would my internal team adopt this technology? How would my target audience respond?" All tech solutions must work in concert with your institution's unique marketing strategy and key messages and then there's the human factor.

If your messaging and your processes are not well developed – that's where you start. We can help (info@intead.com).

It's important to note: we're not in the business of promoting or selling any of these tools. We are simply keeping our ear to the ground and listening for emerging trends in the market. And right now, a number of interesting technology solutions seem to be springing up! 

Let's see what they have to offer...

Looking for new ways to connect with students from some of Africa’s biggest providers of international students, including Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya? Trendy “tech hubs” are an interesting new student source to keep an eye on.

Diversification is key to a successful global recruitment strategy. With recruiting challenges and competition rising in China and India, smart money is looking at emerging pockets of talented and motivated students. These locales will not achieve the size of either India or China in terms of total numbers of students sent abroad. But that's not really the point. 

When you consider return on investment for institutions with low brand awareness, recruitment sources outside of India and China present real opportunities.

For U.S. institutions looking for talented international students (particularly at the graduate level), Africa's tech hubs may be just the place to forge valuable connections.

We've got your attention now, right? Read on for the valuable information you need to make solid budget allocation decisions.

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 is known here in the US and globally for its career connections. About a year ago, they launched University Finder. We've written about it and the value of LinkedIn to universities before (Intead LinkedIn Blog Post, March 2015) and wanted to check in again since this social networking tool is a bit unique.

We scanned the internet to find relavant statistics for you and found a few that are important. Of LinkedIn's 380M global users, 13% are 15-34 years old. In the US, 15% are 14-17 years old. Prospective students anyone?

Forbes reports that 48% of LinkedIn users are on there for 2 hrs/wk and 18% are on for 7 hrs/wk. Here's the thing: LinkedIn users are not watching cat videos and just idling away the hours (Pinterest). They are researching specific things, looking for opportunities. This is a work zone!

So we checked in on the university search tool to see what kind of user stats we could find and came up entirely empty. We'd really like to know what kind of traffic this school search feature is getting one year after launch. As we continue to look for that important data, we asked our international blogger, Emily, to take the tool out for a spin and see what it produced.

Bottom Line: The most common university mistake on LinkedIn is making your "company" page focused solely on alumni. This social media channel can be a strong recruitment tool.

Now, digital marketing insights from Emily to help you get inside the head of an international student searching for just the right academic experience...

In our ongoing effort to expose our readers to innovative educational models, we'd like to share this podcast with Nikhil Abraham from Codecademy, the leader in online coding education. Codecademy's model shakes the foundation of traditional education. What is the future of new educational models? How will Codecademy affect traditional modes of education?

In 2014 our research and editorial teams worked hard to bring you engaging and cutting-edge blog articles. As we enter 2015 we thought a retrospective of the best and most popular Intead content of 2014 was in order-- just in case you missed anything the first time around.

Itinerary. Check. Tickets. Check. Hotel confirmations. Check. Passport. Check. Seems like you're all ready for your fall international student recruitment travel. But are you? What is your strategy for building and maintaining connections with the prospective students and parents you meet on the road? What's the point of traveling, the financial and time commitment, if you aren't going to effectively leverage your contacts?

If you haven’t started utilizing gamification for the purposes of attracting, recruiting and enrolling students both domestically and internationally, you should. University websites toting lists of information and a couple pictures won’t cut it in the competitive market that is international recruitment today. Nowadays, in a world where young adults are almost obsessively focused with devices—and the app games available on them—you need to cater to those interests in order to be noticed.