As a campus recruiter, you’re well-versed in the context of an ever-changing landscape, and yes, things are very much changing. Oh don’t get us wrong: the fundamentals of engaging top university candidates aren’t going anywhere, but with the tech-savvy Millennials and Gen Z reshaping the work world, your technical toolbox needs to be sharpened.

If you’re anything like us, you can’t wait to see the hiring process refine itself (yep, we’re great believers of the modern adage of working smarter, and not just harder for its own sake).

Whether you’re sourcing for candidates online, conducting fieldwork at a career fair or prepping for a promising follow-up, here are 10 on-campus recruiting platforms to be excited about in 2020.

Let’s dig in by category:

Online Sourcing

Photo source: Screenshot from CalPolyPomona

First up, let’s check out Portfolium, a leading e-portfolio network for students to showcase their academic work, projects and skills to potential employers. These guys have developed a rather cutting edge cloud-based platform that curates candidate skills and credentials with style. In practice, Portfolium offers a digital portfolio that showcases all students’ best qualities that simply don’t “sing” in a more rigid resume format.

Not to trample their fire, their team has put it beautifully:

“Portfolium partners with colleges & universities to `help students connect learning with opportunity. Our ePortfolio network helps 5M+ students from over 150 partner institutions manage their skills and launch their careers. Portfolium’s cloud-based platform empowers students with lifelong opportunities to capture, curate, and convert skills into job offers, while giving learning institutions and employers the tools they need to assess competencies and recruit talent.”

As we all know about the troubles with recruiting young people, we’re impressed with how Portfolium brings a holistic view of a student’s abilities and creates a network of quantified candidates that helps employers to improve candidate quality, reduce hiring time and hiring cost. You can create posters for recruitment online with online tools like hiring poster maker PhotoADKing. It has a fantastic hiring poster maker tool to hold your hands and helps to increase your reach.

If you need to cast your net wider through online sourcing, give them a look, and enjoy.

Campus Recruiting Software

Photo source: Rakuna

Career fairs and on-campus events are the meat-and-potatoes of campus recruiting technology, so you want to hit with maximum effectiveness here. At Rakuna, we’ve developed a targeted solution to the classical frustrations of campus and career fair recruiting. You know the drill: it’s the same story of bloated paper trails, mixed up or lost candidate information, cups of pens, and of course, stacks of clipboards after each career fair or recruiting event. How that really translates is lost time and reduced productivity, period, and it’s been a bummer.

To help you overcome this ordeal, we provide a mobile solution for the campus recruiters to capture and evaluate candidates’ credentials in person, and a dashboard for the talent acquisition team to enhance the follow-up process and access to young talents.

Unlike check-in solutions, our recruiting app allows recruiters to be 100% engaging with candidates while collecting required information at fingertips. Imagine having a central online hub to manage your early-career talent pipeline. No more worry that your top candidates would get lost in a spreadsheet or pile of paper resumes in your filing cabinets, your ATS, or even the recycling bins.

From filtering candidates by specific criteria, sending out bulk messages for follow-up, to collaborating with hiring managers, other recruiting team members, and having a visual, meaningful campus recruiting metric report at hand - you can do all in one place using our platform. That’s the kind of next-gen campus recruiting solution that we talk about.

Interview Scheduling Tool

Photo source: Screenshot from Rakuna

Another great tool to consider for your virtual recruiting platform is interview scheduling software. Rakuna’s Interview Scheduling Software automates the candidate interview scheduling process, cuts out the back-and-forth emails for scheduling and rescheduling so that recruiters can accomplish more.

The automation tool eliminates old-fashioned back and forth communication and allows candidates to proactively book interviews with interviewers. The standardized evaluation form built within the tool helps recruiters quickly view, approve, and reject interviews on a single streamlined platform. With the insanely simple bulk scheduling feature, Rakuna lets recruiters invite multiple candidates to schedule interviews with interviewers with just a few clicks.

Additionally, this tool allows employers to provide a superior interview experience for candidates with quick follow-up with customized and automated messages pre- and post-interviews. Leveraging this interview scheduling tool, recruiters and recruiting coordinators can easily speed up the hiring processes and improve candidate experiences.

Put by Rakuna customers: “The Interview Scheduling product saves me countless hours of back-and-forth communication with students. What used to take me up to a full day of stress, now is done about 5-10 minutes, and in a competitive job market, these are the types of things that separate us from the competition – being able to provide fast responses and an effortless candidate experience.”

Virtual Career Fair

Photo source: Brazen

We know in campus recruiting, career fairs are going nowhere, but they will definitely evolve, and we think virtual career fair is the next thing your organization should embrace - if you want to cast a wider net at lower cost.

When it comes to virtual career fairs, you can join broad-based virtual career fairs hosted by companies like job sites Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, or organize your own. If you are keen on organizing your own virtual career fair instead, Brazen is gonna worth your attention. Its cloud-based platform for virtual career fairs and networking sessions lets companies hold online events easily. The technology allows for timed, one-on-one interactions via Web chat in which job candidates and employers can get to know each other without ever leaving their homes or offices. Put by their founder: “We’re offering them something better than job listing. We’re offering them an opportunity to actually talk and connect with a real person.”

Video Interview Platform

Photo source: Screenshot from Saba

Campus recruiting often lack the budget and resources to reach all of the campuses you would like to, so live and on-demand video can be a boon. There is a myriad of video interviewing software out there, but we believe HireVue is the pioneer in this space. HireVue provides both asynchronous (one-way) and synchronous (two-way) video interviews, all the while making use of nifty extras like predictive analytics. In other words, it’s an awesome format for vetting more candidates in shorter amount of time while maximizing personalization and candidate experience, and we love it. What a way to speed up the recruiting process, with a flavor of digital jazz to boot.

In their own wonderful words:

“We make business personal again. And we do it by promoting meaningful human interaction through a digitally enhanced, connected experience that we call a Talent Interaction Platform™.”

Structured Digital Interviews

Photo source: Screenshot from Entrevestor

If you are looking to double your odds of hiring the right person, implementing a structured interview process is the way to go. Instead of relying on a random set of questions for each candidate, a structured interview methodology provides you with the means to objectively compare applicants based on standardized criteria. By allowing you to digitize your custom interview guides and rating rubrics, the VidCruiter platform has made the process of conducting structured interviews significantly simpler. Whether you have an applicant complete an asynchronous (one-way) video interview, connect with you on a live video interview, or you interview them in person, your interview script and rating scales are easily accessible from the device of your choice. Instead of collecting and manually calculating the scores from cumbersome paper-based forms, the system organizes the information submitted by each rater and automatically calculates a candidate’s score in real-time. You can quickly sort applicants based on their ratings and find the top performers in no time.

Virtual Event

Photo source: Screenshot from Wolves Summit

A great alternative to Brazen for virtual career fairs or the virtual recruiting platform is Hopin. Hopin is a London-based startup that just launched their product in March 2020. The company has since expanded rapidly from a 6-people team to targeting 200 headcounts by the end of 2020, and they are extremely busy with scaling to meet the exponential demands accelerated by Covid-19 now.

Hopin’s virtual event platform empowers organizations that help job seekers and businesses to connect on an easy-to-use platform to replace traditional in-person recruiting events. Their offering provides businesses with the ability to create an in-person event experience as effective as possible, but online and all in one place. Furthermore, the features of Hopin represent events in- person around the five key areas of video collaboration that include reception, stage, sessions, networking and expo. They provide an effective platform for recruitment, internal mobility, or replacement for traditional campus recruitment.

In their own words: “with Hopin, you can create live online events that are interactive and personal.”

We are very impressed with the sleek design and easy-to-use platform, and especially its networking feature to avoid the traditional live streaming virtual events that lose the interaction and engagement aspects of the in-person events. Hopin allows up to 100,000 people to tune in to presentations happening on the stage, and targets to increase this figure up to 1 million soon.

Virtual Hiring Events

Photo source: Screenshot from Business Wire

Paradox is no stranger to the world of the virtual recruiting platform and is a well-known company in the HR world. Launched at the end of 2016, Paradox has established with the goal of becoming the most candidate-centric organization in the world. Paradox is a rapidly growing company that aims to revolutionize the recruiting technology with Artificial Intelligence. “Hire Olivia” is a human-like chat operating system and an AI communication assistant. She assists recruiters and recruiting teams to spend more time with candidates by automating usual tasks like interview scheduling, screening applicants, improving conversations and answering all candidate questions. Compared to the traditional recruiting chatbot, Olivia functions as the primary communication point for candidates during their recruiting processes. She gives one-to-one experience to the candidates and also arranges the interview scheduling. “Schedule Olivia” can help recruiters manage their candidates and recruit multiple applicants at one time with virtual recruiting events.

Paradox has gained the trust of more than 200 clients worldwide since its founding, including some of the world’s leading brands, owing to its ease of use and value for money. Olivia is the best suite for companies with high demand recruiting needs, complicated interview requirements, or organizations that aim to improve their candidates’ experiences and engagements.

Candidate Sourcing Platform

Photo source: Screenshot from Computer Business Review

Are you aware that LinkedIn’s social networking professional site is larger than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? It has over 600 million professional profiles, suggesting almost endless network connections. In addition to being a job-posting and networking platform, Linkedin’s mobile campus recruiting technology will give recruiters a lot of benefits.

Linkedin is great to help recruiters to reach out to passive applicants. According to Linkedin, its users account for 70% of “passive applicants” and such users are considered the optimal target for recruiters. As a recruiter, you can recommend a particular job opening to the candidates. Also, recruiters can actively look for candidates using keywords and can narrow their searches for suitable candidates in their profiles by cross-referencing requirements.

Both Linkedin’s IOS and Android mobile apps work well and can be downloaded completely free, enabling recruiters to review profiles, handle job postings, add and save notes more quickly and conveniently at the same time. In reality, Linkedin’s statistics show that three-fourths of recruiters claim to work better and more effectively on the app.

College-Focused Candidate Sourcing Platform

Photo source: Screenshot from Philly Voice

WayUp is a virtual recruiting platform where college students or fresh graduates and employers can effectively connect with each other. WayUp allows recruiters to discover and identify early career applicants for paid internships and entry positions. Besides that, this virtual recruiting platform can help businesses recruit more applicants in a shorter time with a network of more than 4.5 million graduates and over 6.500 universities and colleges listed.

“WayUp is a great campus recruiting technology for us to find early career talents. Leveraging their job targeting allows us to find the needle in a haystack candidate that typically is hard to find on other platforms” _ Erik Hildebrandt, Head of Talent Acquisition – Philips

Conclusion

So there you have it. We hope you’ve enjoyed this targeted glimpse into the future of campus recruiting technologies. Here’s to riding that future together.

Read more: Best practices for accepting resumes at career fairs

This blog post originally appears on Rakuna's blog.