By Britt Yenser
This article is about building a strong student employment program and recruiting students to that program. If you want to learn more about management and training, encouragement and feedback, and reflection and documentation, stay tuned for more articles!
If you run any sized department in Higher Education, it is likely you also have student employees. If your department is anything like mine, you might even rely on those student employees to keep your department running smoothly. You need students who are reliable, who care about their work, and who will stay with your department for the duration of their educational careers. But what do you do if you rely on student employees, and are having difficulty recruiting the right type of student to your team? If you’re struggling to build your student-employee staff, it might be time to rebuild your student-employment program and redefine your recruitment strategy.
Build Up Your Program
There are four foundational steps to a successful student employment program. Building, or rebuilding, a program with these steps is a lot of work, but it is crucial to your success. Like anything, if you don’t have a strong foundation everything is going to crumble. As you read the foundational steps, I encourage you to ground yourself in this quote from the book referenced in step one: “Cut the tethers that hold you to the earth, and dream about how your team would look if it could be anything it wanted.”
Step One: Create a Common Purpose and Quality Standards.
The Common Purpose is your mission statement—it grounds the work of your department and gives a reason for everything you do. Quality Standards are the standards that uphold that Common Purpose; they provide both logic and accountability to the Common Purpose. If you want to learn more about this, read Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service by Theodore Kinni. As I read that book, I constructed a series of meetings where my student employees and I crafted our department’s Common Purpose and Quality Standards. Involving the students not only left us with a mission and guidelines that we all believed in, but it created significant buy-in among my student staff. Those students not only began to care deeply about their work, but they also recruited other students to the team who they knew would share in our mission.
Step Two: Build a recognizable brand.
One of my students designed a logo for our department, and we put this logo on black t-shirts (with our logo on the front, and “AV Event Technician” written across the back). Your school might have strict branding guidelines, and you might not be able to get away with your own logo. But you can probably have shirts made! Students love free shirts. They love the structure of knowing what to wear to work. And, best of all, they become recognizable. Other students will want to know what they need to do to get that cool shirt. Since my students are event technicians and interface with end clients often, I also had business cards made. They are branded in the same exact way a professional staff member’s card is, but the name and phone number are left blank for the students to write in their information. This not only elevated our service across the campus, but it made our service appealing. Imagine if your student employee was talking to another student about their job, and then they handed them a business card. That’s powerful stuff!
Step Three: Have a clear job description.
Right from the start, students should understand what will be expected of them, how they will be managed, how they will be compensated, and what the steps are to apply to the job. Outlining this information clearly will both eliminate some anxiety the student might be feeling and will attract the students who are actually interested in the work.
Step Four: Know your own management style and be consistent from recruitment to the bitter end.
We will get more into management in later articles, but this is mentioned here because there should not be any surprise for the students. If you end up acting like a completely different human when the student starts the job versus how you acted during recruitment, they might decide to abandon ship, or, arguably worse, decide to stay on but half-ass it.
Recruit the Right Crew
After you’ve built a strong student employment program, one that students can be excited to join, it’s time to recruit students to your Dream Team. Here are four strategies I’ve used, in order of success rate:
One: Word of mouth.
Now, I know almost anyone who works with student employees will tell you “word of mouth” is the best recruitment strategy, and you might find yourself thinking, “What does that even mean?” It means that you turn your current students into walking advertisements for your department. This is where your Common Purpose, your branding, and your business cards all come into play. You already have students who are excited about their work because they are all working toward a common goal, they look like a team, and they are treated like professionals. Tell them “When you go back to your dorm, go to the common room and talk to the people there about your job.” My students have recruited in their dorms, after class, on the shuttle, in the Union building—anywhere they see other students who they know, they are inviting people to give our team a try.
Two: Don’t be the Great and Powerful Oz.
No one likes the person behind the curtain, because they don’t know who they are! Get out on the campus and interface with the students. Eat in the dining hall. Go to an event. Carry around a ladder and when a student looks at you funny, explain what your job is. The more involved you are on your campus, and the more students know you, the more likely they are to approach you about a job opportunity.
Three: Set up a lemonade stand.
Okay, not literally. But consider setting up a table in your Union building or another highly trafficked area. Have informational fliers about your job ready to hand out and have applications there ready to be filled out. Be transparent about how many positions you’re looking to fill, and what your application process entails. If you can, have a little giveaway item like candy or stickers to entice students to your table. I have literally set up a table in our Union building and yelled “Hey, you want a job?!” at students as they passed by. Guess what? It worked. And if you’re a person pining to hire freshmen—set up a table where the freshmen are. Does your school have an Accepted Student Event or an Orientation Weekend? Well, my friend, guess where you should be with your fliers and applications in hand!
Four: Casually advertise.
Make fliers about your position and post them around campus. Try making these funny, interesting, or even vague. One year I simply made a QR code that linked to our job description and application, with the text “Scan to find out.” I’ve also worked with our Marketing team to have the job advertised on our school’s social media. I personally am not on The TikTok, but the students are, and so is the University. Find where the students are getting their information and meet them there.
*Bonus Advice*:
Speaking of meeting students where they are—you may have noticed that at no point in this recruitment section have I encouraged you to seek out “techy” students. While it is sometimes fruitful to recruit from a “feeder program,” or a course of study where students might be getting AV skills, this is not necessary. As a matter of fact, it might be harmful to your program. I encourage you to seek out students who are invested in working, who align themselves with your Common Purpose, and who communicate well. You, as their manager and AV expert, can teach them AV all day long—but you can’t teach them how to be a person. That’s a lot harder and will take a lot more of your time.
Relying on student employees is hard. Recruiting and retaining the right students for your team is even harder. But if you take the time to build your program, trust your current students to care about the team as much as you do, and get out there and recruit, you just might have a well-oiled machine before you know it!