You cannot fetter potential students and coerce them into your school’s lecture theatres. Nor can you compel them to read things associated with your school on their tablets, smartphones or computers.
You need proactive student enrolment strategies if you want to boost your recruitment numbers. In this article, we will walk you through three tactics to get you cracking. However, before anything, let’s look at what student recruitment is.
What Student Recruitment Is and its Significance
If you are looking into the education industry, the chances are that you have come across the concept of student recruitment.
Do you happen to know? Student recruitment is one of the subject matters that demand the attention of most schools. The reason is a clear-cut case. It will ascertain the calibre of applicants who will get enrolled. Recruitment will also verify the viability of the educational business.
The assignment help has stated that recruitment also plays a significant role in boosting the reputation of an educational institution.
In short, a university or college without undergraduate and postgraduate students is bound to go extinct. It’s because it is no longer a lucrative business to its owner. Therefore, we cannot rule out the significance of student recruitment.
Student recruitment refers to finding and enrolling the most suitable candidates within the campus in a prompt and penny-wise manner.
In any case, it involves some marketing and interactive tactics that educational institutions often carry out. The school’s marketing department achieves this by attracting the attention of potential students with these strategies first. After that, they engage and turn these groups of individuals into regular enrollments.
Student recruitment also refers to the process of looking out for potential students and spurring them to apply for the school’s programs.
What are the Common Student Recruitment Processes?
Let’s explore the typical student recruitment processes. They include:
- Defining and evaluating academic requirements.
- Employing interactive actions to draw the attention of potential students.
- Collaborating with the academic supervisory departments and marketing departments to catch students’ fancy.
- Evaluating and choosing the best candidates.
- Helping students to secure their visa application process.
- Managing the enrollment process and the eventual application.
- Incorporating the freshmen into the university community.
- Assist students in whichever situation whenever the need arises.
Any professional can pull off the student recruitment technique. All they need to do to get started is to cultivate a healthy relationship with potential candidates by offering orientation and assistance during the admission stage.
An excellent student recruiter is a go-getting person. It is someone who can connect the impact of campaign activities on outcomes or results. Energy, determination and ambition are the crucial skills that anyone involved in student recruitment should imbibe thoroughly.
Why are Academic Recruiters Important?
If academic recruiters cease to exist, educational institutions will find it difficult to enroll new students. They would find it challenging to enroll well-groomed students. Hence, the Institution will not be able to make some money. In the same breath, they will gradually lose their prestige.
Academic recruiters are the professionals who execute and manage the entire student recruitment stage. Depending on the Institution’s strength, different key personalities often tend to the student recruitment stage.
The most typical job titles associated with student recruitment are not limited to the following:
- Admissions officer.
- Marketing expert.
- Communication expert.
- International admissions expert.
- Marketing and admissions expert.
Most educational institutions will allow their academic recruiters, overseas agents or external admissions experts to manage the student recruitment stage. By doing so, they can reach a massive number of potential candidates globally.
3 Best Student Recruitment Strategies
Let’s explore the three best student recruitment strategies.
Opt for Subsidized Tuition
As the school fees become unaffordable and students hardly have chances with scholarship initiatives, subsidized education costs become a robust persuasive tool. A significant number of colleges offer bulk discounts for their tuition as an advantage.
Before you protest against the general capability of a specific school, you need to consider the bright side. A reasonable number of top-tier universities have reduced their tuition costs to attract potential candidates. It makes tertiary education possible to acquire, which means several students.
Collaborate with the Best Communities and High Schools
Discounted tuition is one of the excellent ways to bring the attention of potential candidates to your school. However, it’s not enough. It would help if you networked with people within and outside your local communities to make it work.
It would help target high schools, brands, churches, and other communities to build healthy relationships with prospective candidates.
How do you collaborate with networks within and outside your local communities? Let’s explore them.
- Work with your alumni network.
It would be best if you looked after your alumni connections in a way that they can fetch potential students for you. They can also introduce your school to friends and members of their family. Your alumni network can serve as student ambassadors for your school by relaying their experiences to prospective candidates and mentoring them.
- Organize career fairs and online campus tours
Collect and collate the participants’ details and engage with individuals that have indicated an interest in your school.
- Network with principals, HRs and other individuals in strategic positions
It’s crucial to keep in touch with high school principals, human resource managers and every other person that can help you to persuade potential students. In any case, you can also introduce them to your graduate school and what sets it apart from other institutions.
- Organize events in your Institution
We suggest that you organize events in your school. Make sure you encourage potential candidates to opt for your campaigns through emails or SMS. This way, you can obtain their contact details.
Tailor your Content To Virtual Attention
It’s no surprise that some institutions do not trifle with their online presence. Researching schools that suit your needs is no different.
It’s one of the most significant reasons student recruitment tactics must lean towards improving your content to establish an online presence. By doing so, your Institution will constantly appear on search results and motivate them to explore your website.
Note that every college and university wants similar attention. You only need a few seconds to make the best first impression.
Let’s look at how you can gain the attention you have always wanted.
- SEO Optimization
SEO optimization refers to the process of upgrading your content to boost their visibility when people search for your Institution, products or services on Google and other search engines. The higher visibility your website has in search results, the more likely you are to earn attention. You will also attract prospective students to your school.
Let’s look at how you can optimize your content with SEO in mind.
- Keyword Targeting
The first big step in search engine optimization (SEO optimization) is to figure out what and how you want to optimize. It means that you need to determine the most familiar words that people research on search engines. These words are known as keywords.
For instance, you may want your school to appear whenever people look for an “enabling environment” and maybe when they search things like “student care initiative.”
In any case, there are numerous crucial factors to consider when mapping out the keywords that you desire on your website.
First, you need to determine the number of people that keep researching a specific keyword. This is where the search volume comes into play. According to the reports of Mike Gelb, the college essay writer, the more people research a keyword, the bigger the prospective audience you are bound to reach. Hence, it’s not the best idea to opt for a keyword that doesn’t catch the audience’s fancy. No matter what you want to bring to the table, it would be best if you put your audience first.
Second, it’s not enough to optimize your SEO content for your audience. You need to strive for content that will match the needs and expectations of your audience. This is where keyword relevance comes into the scene.
Finally, it’s crucial to understand your potential candidates and what they will probably research. Do you want to enroll more graduate students than undergraduate students? From there, you can figure out strategies to strike a balance between these categories of students.
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- What problems do they wish they could solve?
- What attracts their attention?
- Which other schools are they searching for?
- What are their interests like?
Once you have mapped out your answers to these questions, you will better understand the kind of keywords to incorporate into your content. You will also be able to choose the relevant ones.
- Meta Descriptions
A meta description is a short snippet used to describe your website’s content. Search engines like Google often utilize them in search results to attract visitors to your page. It will help your visitors to decide whether to click on your page or not.
Make sure you create compelling Meta descriptions that include the right keywords to motivate searchers to visit your web page.
- Unique Content
The body content is, of course, crucial. There are no miracles that will happen in terms of a few pages of duplicated and unattractive content. As an educational institution exuding excellence, you need to create unique and intelligent content.
- Video Utilization
Videos are illustrative and aesthetic. Hence, it can either draw the attention of potential students or shift it away. So, they are critical for your student recruitment tactics.
The most significant benefits of video marketing tactics are that you are receptive to the vagaries of this time. It will help you to get nearly ten times more responses from potential candidates than written content. Most people carry their mobile phones everywhere they go. It means that the chances are that video ads from your school reaching them are higher.
A Video marketing plan will help you to reach your targeted audience within the shortest possible time. It means that there is no delay in putting your Institution out there. You will get automated responses from prospective candidates, allowing you to improve your strategy.
- Accurate Audience Targeting
It would be best if you allowed social media ads like Instagram and Twitter to show up on the feeds of individuals searching for courses in your place.
Conclusion
Student recruitment tactics will draw students’ attention, encourage them and get them to opt for your Institution. When you network with potential students through career fairs, you have the luxury to know their needs. In return, you can match their expectations in the long run.
About the author:
Tiffany Harper is a training guru who’s been working in the corporate sector as a technology expert for several years now. She is a management graduate and loves to share her experience through blogs and expert articles with the best essay writing service. For her love of writing, she provided online consultations for one college essay writer while working with rushessay.com. Please do not hesitate to contact her on LinkedIn.
