Graduate Promotions and the rise of on-campus marketing

The world of graduate marketing has changed substantially since the turn of the 21st Century. Pressure on graduate recruiters to market to students more effectively has increased at a moment when new, more penetrative marketing techniques have become available.

Graduate Promotions was responsible for making these new techniques available and the new demand for them is what has both fuelled and directed the Company’s growth.

What sets us apart as a company is not just our client-base and our leading position within our market, but also that we created the industry sector in which we compete.

To understand the history of Graduate Promotions it is necessary to understand these recent changes in graduate recruitment marketing.

The old ways not always the best ways

The reason for the appeal of these new on-campus techniques lay partly in the deficiencies of the existing approaches.

Traditional graduate recruitment marketing routes – including new ones involving the Web – primarily relied on reaching students while they were looking for jobs.

The problem with this is that students generally divide their time between studying, taking part in sports and other club/society activities, some paid work to make ends meet and, notoriously, socialising. At certain stages of their university courses, they will then add ‘career-seeking’ (i.e. considering, researching, deciding on, and applying in pursuit of a career) to these three or four broad time divisions, making four or five. So marketing routes relying only on the relatively small portion of overall time students allocate to career-seeking have, of course, their limitations.

Registrations with careers services, company recruitment brochures and websites, advertisements in careers-specific publications and the like can only reach students while they’re actually looking for careers – not during the much larger amounts of time they spend doing other things.

Pressure mounting on graduate recruiters

The other reason why the new on-campus techniques have become so important is the increased pressure on graduate recruiters of recent years:

• Economic cycle: in recent years the demands of major organisations for graduate talent have been rising continually, and to historic levels;
• Competition: as a consequence, competition between graduate recruiters for broadly the same number of graduates has intensified;
• Attention deficit: year-by-year, students face increasing academic and financial pressures while at university meaning they can afford less and less time on pre-graduation career-seeking, reducing further the impact of marketing routes which rely on catching them while engaged in this activity.

New techniques not previously viable

Another reason for the recent rise in the use of on-campus marketing is the simple one that the techniques had not, previously, been available to graduate recruiters in any viable way.

This was because of the practical difficulties – and hence costs of resource and time – any one graduate recruiter needed to overcome in order to deploy strategies requiring such extensive specialised knowledge of and individual attention to each target university.

Most organisations recruiting graduates target a number of different universities. Each one, however, is invariably different, with different organisational structures, procedures and ways of getting things done.

This means that even organising traditional events such as careers presentations (let alone something more unusual) requires a different process at each institution. While usually not individually complicated, the plethora of different processes across a number of universities requires careful attention and management, and consumes a large amount of a graduate recruiter’s time.

More complicated events or innovative ideas, beyond the traditional routes, are often even more fraught with problems. European universities, generally publicly or semi-publicly funded, are seldom particularly geared towards offering additional marketing opportunities to external advertisers outside the standard options.

Anything non-standard therefore requires careful exploration and discussion, invariably different for each university. This means that achieving innovative additional marketing at universities requires a detailed and up-to-date level of knowledge of each one that is not viable for any one recruiter or even advertising agency to maintain.

This is where the role of Graduate Promotions in the rise of on-campus marketing has lain. Graduate Promotions was established as a separate agency dedicated to conducting on-campus marketing.

By working with a range of graduate recruiters, maintaining the detailed level of knowledge of the different processes, formalities and policies of individual universities which is necessary for executing modern on-campus techniques became viable.

It is the need for these new ways of marketing (arising both because of the deficiencies in the traditional ways and the new pressures on graduate recruiters), combined with the new ability of graduate recruiters to implement them, which has given rise to these recent changes in the world of graduate recruitment marketing.

The development of Graduate Promotions

The first two recruitment seasons of Graduate Promotions’ operation involved ground-breaking, highly innovative work with a number of graduate recruiters, and by 2004 this had shifted the competitive landscape amongst major graduate recruiters further: recruiters using innovative marketing strategies were stealing a march on other recruiters in terms of numbers of applications from students, quality of applications from students and the number of students offered roles who were accepting them.

In 2004, as a result, a far larger number of the UK’s leading graduate recruiters chose these additional routes to help them recruit the best graduates.

It was also in 2004 that Graduate Promotions executed the first major pan-European campaign, across 11 countries, bringing systematically applied on-campus techniques to a large number of European universities for the first time.

Graduate Promotions today

Today, Graduate Promotions works internationally at over 140 universities, business schools, and other higher education institutions. The Company counts amongst its clients many of the foremost graduate recruiters globally and the leading recruitment advertising agencies. As the factors which brought about the need for enhanced on-campus marketing for graduate recruiters continue to develop, Graduate Promotions continues to seek the best and most appropriate ways for graduate recruiters to attract the right students. Our experience of navigating the complexities of university life and delivering effective, controlled and appropriate marketing campaigns remains second to none.