Introduction:

Career services teams at e-learning companies face several challenges that affect their overall student outcomes (placements). A major challenge is reaching out to employers/ hiring partners to showcase your upskilled learners, getting their responses and building recurring relations. Career services teams face numerous challenges like:

1. Struggling with low response rate from hiring partners/employers.

2. Facing friction on e-mails and resistance from new hiring partners due to lack of trust.

3. Spending major part of their time making a structured candidate list to share with every new employer.

4. Low response rate increases student’s dissatisfaction as there’s no transparency on job application status.

This repetitive and tedious manual process leaves very little time for their core placement activities. In this article, we will be covering smart ways to conduct employer outreach and proven methods to improve your employer's response from the current ratio of 5% to more than 20%.

How is employer outreach performed today?

Here's how employer outreach is performed today:

• The first step is sourcing jobs manually, which takes close to 5–6 hours daily. Once they find these jobs, the next step is identifying the employers and finding their email addresses using tools like Apollo, Lusha, etc.

• After that, they'll either write to the employers via email, send a LinkedIn message, or call them directly. Most of the time, they send out emails initially.

• However, they often have to resort to calling because they don't get enough response from employers over emails-only around 5% at best.

• Once these 5% of the employers respond, the placement teams attach the candidate resumes to the email and send them over. Again, this isn't the best way because the employer has to open each attachment individually. There's no summary highlighting the benefits of hiring these candidates - the employer has to go through them, evaluate them, provide the feedback, and then proceed.

Why is current employer outreach resulting in low response rate?

The low response rate can be due to multiple reasons, but it's definitely not because the employer doesn't need candidates. It's essential to understand why employers don't respond:

• One reason is that employers get bombarded with resumes from people every day since they have access to various job portals like Naukri, LinkedIn, etc. It's not that they lack resumes, but they do need quality resumes.

• Another reason they don't respond is because they don't want to waste time building another relationship without realizing if these are good candidates. This approach fails to highlight the key strengths of the candidates and makes it viable to access each candidate one by one which results in low response from the recruiters.

• This low response rate is really concerning, especially since these employers are actively looking for candidates.

What is the smart way to perform employer outreach?

• The smart way to approach employer outreach starts with sourcing jobs efficiently. (In one of our previous articles, we discussed how AI bots can eliminate the manual process of visiting career sites repeatedly.)

• Now that you have those job openings, the important part is showcasing your talent to these potential employers without having them connect with you or build a relationship first. They want to see the proof upfront.

• It's better to send them a link where you can list all your students that matches the job profile. Make sure to only send your best candidates you believe they would like.

• Don't try to push the majority of your candidates initially; you can do that once you build a relationship at a later stage.

• Share these candidates via a smart link that allows the recruiter to view the candidates' profiles, projects, achievements, and possibly video resumes. This will help them quickly assess and get overview of the candidate in the shortest time without having to put in a lot of efforts

• It's advisable to be very clear in your outreach emails to employers that this is a free service, and they don't have to pay anything for it.

• You should leverage AI to highlight the key strengths of the candidates, showcasing them in a more impactful way and making it easier for the potential employers to know if the person fits the role's requirements. This increases the response rate by over 300% for the same set of e-mails you send out.

Conclusion:

Considering the intense competition in the recruitment landscape, it is highly crucial to optimize your employer outreach to get greater response rates and stand out among them. Additionally, it's also essential to showcase not only your students but also your company and the brand so that the recruiter you'll be reaching out to does not hesitate or have trust issues. Using smart candidate links for showcasing talent in a structured way can increase employer response rates from the current 5% to over 20%, which is an increase of close to 300%.