How e-learning career services teams can improve employer outreach

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.

1. Facing friction on emails and resistance from new hiring partners due to lack of trust.

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

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

Repeated manual administration leaves less time for core placement activities. This article looks at ways to source relevant openings and share candidate information clearly with employers.

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 to 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 by email alone.

• Once 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. Our guide to helping learners find jobs covers ways to reduce repeated visits to career sites.

• 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 effort.

• Explain how your hiring support works and make any fees clear before an employer agrees to use 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 helps employers review relevant strengths without opening each resume separately.

Conclusion:

Make employer outreach relevant and easy to review. Present suitable candidates through a structured link, explain their skills and work, and include clear information about your institution. Track responses and follow up based on what employers need.