One of her conclusions was that if she wanted to work in manufacturing she might move to Germany.

Any graduate recruiters at engineering firms listening were no doubt dismayed to hear this. The STEM skills-gap is a key challenge for their sector, and one that is compounded by the fact that Engineering and other STEM graduates, with their keen analytical and numerical skills, are aggressively targeted by employers in other sectors, such as investment banking.

It is pretty clear however that the investment banks are making greater resource available to engage with potential graduate hires than are engineering firms – particularly at top-tier universities like Oxford – and with tremendous effect.  The extent to which Lady Thatcher’s premiership is the ultimate cause of this is, as they say, a debate for another day.

What can safely be said for now is that, through judicious use of impactful on-campus graduate marketing, investment banks have been making significant inroads on the recruitment of high-quality engineers.

1. Newton’s Second Law

- The more massive a brand, the more force it takes to change its position:

We help employers with big, established brands to leverage existing awareness so that their graduate proposition is aligned to their more general corporate messages. Where there are deeply-held misperceptions about them, this can be a real challenge. Investment Banks, for example, often find it a real challenge to let students know about the diversity of their opportunities in non-traditional areas such as technology, which was the context of our multi-award-winning “Field of Sparks” campaign for J.P. Morgan.

For employers with less well-known student-facing brands on the other hand, there is an opportunity to carve out an attractive USP in the minds of students and really punch above their weight using imaginative but efficient approaches.

2. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

- The act of measurement changes what you’re measuring; similarly, asking people how to market them doesn’t give you an accurate answer:

Dan gives some great examples of how consumers don’t always give an accurate representation their behaviours when asked, and arguably this is even truer when you ask students how best to market careers to them. The reason for this is that there is usually far more education to be done in graduate marketing than in consumer-facing marketing; you are not only trying to sell a current opportunity, but to educate your audience about what it involves and what it might become in the future. We help employers to avoid these banana skins as they plan their campaigns.

3. The Scientific Method 

- You can continually strengthen a brand, but it only takes a moment for it totally to lose standing in the minds of your audience:

Some employers find that they are well-known on-campus, and then, as soon as they stop marketing, it takes years of work and a huge investment of money to recover the brand they once had. We help them to maintain the level of awareness they need year-in, year-out in ways that are innovative and sustainable but don’t require constant (expensive) reinvention of the wheel.

4. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics

- Brand messages will always be dispersed and get more chaotic:

Social networks, in particular online (but also on campus) are increasingly democratising forces, and it’s disconcerting but exciting for recruiters that their employer brand is in no way restricted to the messaging they dictate or the channels they choose for their advertising. Messages about employer brands are constantly unfolding on student forums, social networks, and of course in the discussions amongst students and their influencers on campuses everywhere. What is more, potential hires take the opinions of their peers far more seriously than any corporate messaging.

We help employers to ensure that influential students are better informed about them and make it more likely that they will spread positive messages about them. We also track the diversity of opinions being expressed about their brands online and off, and to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by new media channels.

If you’d like to find out more about any of our services, get in touch today.

A useful resource was Jonah Berger, who has been doing some noteworthy work at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania on word-of-mouth and online virality.

Berger’s research sheds some light on the principles underlying why we share things (both online and offline). In his paper What Makes Online Content Go Viral?, he highlights two key factors that affect what we share:

1. Positive content is more viral than negative content
2. Content that evokes high-arousal emotions, whether positive (awe), or negative (anger or anxiety), is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral.

Berger highlights why this has important implications for marketers and the way in which they engage with their audience:

“People’s behavior is heavily influenced by what others say and do. [If] you are a company trying to get people to talk more about your brand… these results provide insight into how to design more effective messages and communication strategies.”

Perhaps this helps to explain the success of the recent Deloitte graduate campaign. We gave students something (a caricature) which was quirky, humorous and personal to them. The long queues at each campus event and the level of facebook engagement afterwards suggest that we successfully evoked some of these ‘high-arousal’ emotions, and these feelings primed them to share their experience with their friends.

Students are a key target demographic for consumer brands and employers alike. They are co-located (typically 10,000-15,000 at a single university) and highly-connected in terms of both face-to-face interaction and social media.

This means that well-planned integrated campaigns designed with the right behavioural triggers have a good chance of spreading quickly and widely. If your message is compelling – and your idea well-planned and well-executed – your audience will pick it up and run with it. And through this process of amplification you can dramatically ramp up your ROI.

Developing marketing strategies that really connect with students is difficult. We help firms to do so by giving them a better understanding of what really influences their audience’s behaviour. Applying this kind of thinking at the development phase of your marketing planning can be the difference between a good campaign and a remarkable and award-winning campaign.

It’s only an impression, of course, presumably informed by anecdote from some (but maybe only one or two!) line managers, but because this senior leader has formed this view, it risks becoming the common understanding. And, it could then form the basis of dramatic decisions to change strategy for next year.

Or consider the opposite scenario, which is arguably more common.  Although this year’s graduate intake were truly of a significantly lower standard than prior years, it presents too many problems internally for that to be commonly acknowledged, not least because of the unfortunate message to those (now colleagues) who were hired…

The fact is that ‘quality’ is the big, complicating variable in graduate recruitment branding.  In some cases it’s even taboo.  For FMCGs (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods, which tend in many respects to drive the development of branding theory), almost all that matters is the quantity of product shifted – and that’s a doddle to measure.

If graduate branding was as ‘easy’ as FMCG branding, all that would matter is number of graduates hired.  But it’s not that easy, because we care about the quality of those graduates.

In FMCG terms, it’s as if we cared not just about the quantity, but also the quality of the coins going in the till.  This suggests that in graduate branding, often the recipient of less attention than that of consumer goods, we need to be more sophisticated, not less.  And we can’t really have a meaningful conversation with the European division head who believes quality has declined (or that it hasn’t), unless we measure it.

How to do that in a meaningful and robust way?  We can help.  Graduate Promotions assists employers in implementing quality measurement to their graduate hiring.  For more information, just get in touch.

Photo credit: kenteegardin

1. Make sure people of appropriate seniority are present, on both sides.
2. Allow enough time.  3 hours is a good minimum.
3. Agree an agenda in advance.  This should include the various ‘challenge’ elements from last year, any particular ‘axes’ of the Business for the coming year, and any potential research needs.  Another way to construct it is simply to consider what the most senior people in your organisation care most about at the moment.
4. Make sure you have the relevant data to hand – your agency can help you best if you give them enough information for them to gain a proper, detailed understanding of your perspectives.
5. Appoint a time-keeper to keep the agenda under control or, better, use the services of a professional facilitator.
6. Establish, in advance, who will be keeping notes and crystallising them into a report after the meeting.
7. Make sure the room has windows and is big and airy enough.
8. Strategizing can be great fun!  Enhance the enjoyability of the session by doing it over a meal time and laying on delicious things to eat and drink.
9. Make sure your agency follows up on all the points within the next two days, so that action steps can be taken while all the useful learning is fresh in everyone’s minds.

Having established how to get students’ attention, we often advise employers on how to position their brands as clever and intelligent and to improve their appeal to the sharpest minds – and perhaps some of the best examples are the challenging puzzle-based campaigns we have recently helped to plan and arrange for Towers Watson, Mercer and Capital One.

Where challenges like this are used, usually there are prizes up for grabs for students who complete them successfully. Over the course of hundreds of such initiatives, though, we have found that some of the most popular puzzles aren’t always the ones where the best prizes are offered, but the ones that are most pleasing to solve.

The BBC reported this week on the Zoological Society of London’s recent finding that our closest animal cousins, chimpanzees, enjoy solving puzzles simply for the satisfaction it brings, and the opportunity to win a prize is not the incentive that leads them to do so. This is an interesting insight for employers – challenging students to solve puzzles doesn’t just position the brand as intelligent; it gratifies them at a basic animal level… just like a free waffle.

However, according to Ruth Hogg speaking on the Today programme, less than 25% of Glasgow students were expected to turn out for the vote. The online edition of Scotland’s The Herald newspaper suggested that the figure would be even lower than this: closer to 10% of the student population.

Students as a group are traditionally perceived as being very politically active, so this might come as a surprise to some. However, careers advisors and graduate employers are well aware of the challenge in motivating the student audience to participate in campus events and initiatives.

The headlines following the vote focus on the result rather than the turnout (“Is the Glasgow University referendum a blow for the Yes campaign?” Stv news). However,  it is arguably the apparent apathy of the students that is the bigger story.

Similarly, for employers in the current environment, the winners don’t tend just to be those that receive the most applications, but those who maximise the quality, diversity and buy-in of their “electorate” in the undergraduate talent pool. Achieving this helps to create a swing in favour of a better quality of applications and return on investment – and who wouldn’t vote “yes” to that?

Malcolm Gladwell writes at length about this in “Outliers” – going through some of the fascinating deeply-embedded cultural reasons why people from far-eastern countries tend to find maths easier. (A taster from Outliers is here).

If you subscribe to Gladwell’s arguments (and I believe some of them are very compelling), then those reasons run far deeper than point-scoring-politicians would have us believe, or than the popular press is likely to report on, and won’t easily be changed.

Clearly this is a hugely important issue to address though – students of maths and maths-related (“STEM”) subjects are in ever-increasing demand, and every year our clients engage us to help them to address this by planning and arranging targeted student-facing strategies to attract them. If the pool of genuine STEM talent in this doesn’t increase to meet the acute need, however, this will stymie the ability of the UK’s leading firms to innovate and ultimately it’s us and our economy that will suffer.

English: Chinese numbers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We were  awarded the overall prize for ‘Work of the Year’ across the whole of the recruitment advertising industry for the ‘Field of Sparks’ campaign which we conducted for J.P. Morgan alongside Work Communications. It crowned an amazing year for the campaign, which had previously picked up ‘Best Outdoor Campaign’ at the CIPD Awards and ‘Innovation on Campus’ at the TARGETjobs awards in 2012, as well as the ‘Best use of Ambient / Outdoor’ category at the RADs.

The campaign drew the following comments from the RAD award judges:

‘Associating JP Morgan with something so beautiful generated great reactions. This was a step out from the corporate world. Well targeted and brave – it pushed the boundaries. The judges felt that it was original, very creative and refreshing.’

Campaigns we arranged for Barclays (‘Opportunities on a Different Scale’ alongside Stafford Long) and Deloitte (‘It’s Your Future…How Far Will You Take It?’ with Havas People) were also shortlisted.

All of the winners are listed here:

http://www.radawards.com/radawards2013/awardswinners/winners-2013

Throughout the seemingly never-ending barrage of lectures, assignments, sporting and social events, it is easy to feel like the reality of a full time graduate position is in the distant future. This could not be further from the truth. When selection time comes around for graduate recruiters, they are looking for more than just an impressive academic record. According to Penny de Valk in this guardian article, graduate recruiters prioritise the ability to work effectively with others alongside leadership potential.

So what’s the best way to develop these skills? In addition to all of the usual extra-curricular activities that universities offer, demonstrating relevant work experience is a valuable addition to grades on a CV – as well as providing some much-needed cash. Our Student Marketer roles, for example, provide a unique opportunity for students to work throughout the semester on a casual basis, and at the same time to learn about the opportunities available at the major graduate employers that they are representing. Working at one of our client’s events is also a great way to develop skills, for example, in the areas of teamwork and promotion. Click here to apply.