Trevor Buttrum | TalentEgg Trends

Author: Trevor Buttrum

Let’s Talk Talent! April Edition

March 31, 2022 / Trevor Buttrum / 0 Comments

Keeping your employer’s brand and opportunities top of mind for students, new grads, and early career talent is paramount in today’s recruitment landscape. In our work with our clients at TalentEgg, we have found employers experience the greatest success in this regard when they:

Give candidates a real look at “what’s behind the curtain” in your industry and organization
Commit to Investing in skill-building, early career development, and well-being of your workforce
Target and show up often in the digital sphere of Gen Z talent
Help candidates stand out and demonstrate their skills
Share compelling stories that candidates can see themselves reflected in
Take a multi-faceted and high touch approach during peak recruitment periods

Last month, we explored approach # 2 – Commit to investing in your workforce’s skill-building, early career development, and well-being and marked the launch of the TalentEgg e-Learning Academy!

In this edition, we will take a deeper dive into approach # 3 – Target and often show up in Gen Z Talent’s digital sphere.

Before the pandemic in March 2020, thought leaders in campus recruitment often talked about “boots on ground” approaches and a need to “show up” often in students, new grads, and early career talent’s environments as parts of an effective campus strategy. To some extent, this also involved having a strong social media presence.

In the age of virtual recruitment and hybrid learning, frequent engagement and “showing up” where the talent you need is already spending time is an even more vital ingredient to campus recruitment and employer branding success. An established social media presence has proven essential but is rarely enough on its own. So, what are some of the other effective ways you can engage students and new grads digitally?

One of the most powerful tools you can have in today’s recruitment toolkit is the ability to tailor your messaging and target your engagement to the audiences you most want to reach. Whether it is those in a specific program or area of study, particular geography or demographic, or those with a certain set of interests, or even speak an additional language, digital engagement enables you to be as targeted in your outreach as you like.

Many of our clients have successfully promoted their brand and opportunities using targeted e-mail blasts and mobile marketing campaigns. This blend provides vehicles for telling their career story, driving traffic to their digital content (e.g. videos, blog posts/editorials) and building awareness of their events and opportunities on a large scale but also a curated audience based on their recruitment needs.

Mobile marketing ads appear where your target audience is already spending time online. And students and new grads have been shown to click these ads at twice the average industry rate. This tells us they are paying attention and engaging with content that appeals to their career interests.

Here are some examples of these marketing tools in action:

Evolution Mining is newer to the Canadian campus recruitment space. They have effectively used e-mail blasts to introduce themselves to students and new graduates with backgrounds in science, mining, geology, environmental science, technology, and engineering, promote their virtual information sessions, and encourage candidates to apply to their new graduate programs.

They have also leveraged mobile marketing to ensure they reach potential candidates from communities close to their mine site, studying at their target schools, or actively interested in a career in mining.

EF Tours needed to find talent for their bilingual sales team based in communities around Montreal. Mobile marketing enabled them to engage a broader pool of candidates with the skills, language profile, interests, and experience they were looking for.

In addition to targeting, consistency in your digital engagement and keeping your brand front and centre with candidates during key recruitment periods are also highly effective. Several of our clients have found leaderboard and pop-up ads to be excellent vehicles for this type of engagement.

Rogers utilizes pop-up ads on TalentEgg’s main pages to drive students and new grads to their open opportunities and to discover more about what it is like to work at Rogers via their employer profile.

Chick-fil-A invites top student and new grad talent to explore their leadership development program and learn more about their distinct workplace culture.

Leaderboard ad

Pop-up ad

Finally, think about ways you can take a few chances and engage Gen Z on other platforms that are a big part of their digital sphere. Recently, TalentEgg has been experimenting with content creation and engagement on TikTok. Over the last few months, we have been steadily increasing our followers and have seen some solid engagement with the career content our team has been sharing on the platform.

If you’re feeling brave and want to pilot sharing some of your own branded content via our TikTok account, reach out to us! We’d love to collaborate with you!!

In summary, target your audience, be consistent with staying top of mind, and don’t be afraid to take a few chances and experiment. These are three tactics TalentEgg has found to be very useful in engaging with and recruiting top students, new graduates, and early career talent in a virtual world.

Until next time…

Let’s Talk Talent! March Edition

February 28, 2022 / Trevor Buttrum / 0 Comments

One constant throughout the Winter-Spring campus recruitment season has been that the competition to attract and retain top students, new graduates, and early career talent is intensifying!

In our work at TalentEgg, we recognize that to attract the talent you are looking for as an employer in the current climate, you need to:

Give candidates a real look at “what’s behind the curtain” in your industry and organization
Commit to Investing in skill building, early career development, and well-being of your workforce
Target and show up often in the digital sphere of Gen Z talent
Help candidates to stand out and demonstrate their skills
Share compelling stories that candidates can see themselves reflected in
Take a multi-faceted and high touch approach during peak recruitment periods

Last time, we kicked off this six-part series focused on successful virtual recruitment and employer branding approaches by taking a deeper dive into approach #1 – Give candidates a real look at “what’s behind the curtain” in your industry and organization.

For this installment, we will take a closer look at approach #2 – Commit to investing in skill-building, early career development, and the well-being of your employees.

Let’s begin by considering “the why” – Here are the top reasons to incorporate this approach as a part of your organization’s recruitment and retention strategy:

1. Professional development is what top early career talent wants most in an employer.

In TalentEgg’s annual survey of students and new grads, professional development is consistently rated at the top of what they are looking for in a potential employer and as a key influencer in their career decision-making. This point has only been driven home since the onset of the pandemic; Gen Y and Z talent are looking for (and are far more likely to stay with) employers who enable them to develop the critical skills they need to succeed on the job and advance in their careers.

2. It’s a win–win!

In study after study conducted recently around the globe, “soft” skills have emerged as the “critical” skills required for employees to meaningfully contribute to their organization’s goals and objectives. By building the capacity of your workforce with the in-demand skills needed for success in your lines of business, you are not only benefiting your talent but also your customers, your managers and leaders, and ultimately, your organization’s bottom line.

3. Improve engagement and retention by fostering a workplace culture that is safe, healthy, inclusive, and committed to excellence.

Investing in the skill-building of your workforce contributes to employees feeling that they are valued, that continuous learning is embedded into your culture, that your organization is a partner in their success, and there is the potential for career advancement. In addition, development focus in areas like mental health and diversity and inclusion can create a greater sense of psychological safety and belonging within your organization. These are all well-established drivers of employee engagement and, particularly as the “Great Resignation” continues to play out, are among the major factors contributing to an employee’s decision to stay or move on.

4. Burnish your employer brand

With a commitment to your talent’s growth, resilience, and career success, comes the reward of strengthening your employer brand. It is incredibly compelling for students, new graduates, and early career talent to see and hear firsthand how your employees’ career success has stemmed from investment in their development at career events on your recruiting calendar like alumni coffee chats, TalentEgg Talks events, career fairs and speed networking. You will also experience the benefit of employees becoming brand ambassadors as they share their career and learning successes on platforms like LinkedIn and are more likely to refer friends and colleagues to open opportunities.

Now that we have explored “the why”… let’s talk about “the how”.

We like to think we have made this piece as easy as possible with the launch of the TalentEgg e-Learning Academy.

Our specially curated offerings enable you to set-up new hires for career success with soft skills training, meaningfully address today’s workplace challenges, and foster a climate of engagement across your organization.

TalentEgg has worked with leading and trusted subject matter experts in soft skills development, mental health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion to produce the e-Learning Academy’s 26-course library and 3 full certificate programs. Current offerings, with even more being added over the coming months, include:

Backpack to Briefcase – Introduction to Workplace Soft Skills

A 5-course certificate program to support your new hire’s school to work transition with soft skills training for their first co-op, internship, or entry level job.

Briefcase to Boardroom – Intermediate Soft Skills to Advance Careers

A 10-course certificate program to take your employees’ soft skills to the next level and set them up for career success.

Mental Health and Psychological Safety in the Workplace Master Certificate Program

This 10-course Master Certificate Program, developed by leading psychologists and mental health professionals, explores the many facets of workplace mental health and provides clear guidance to employee wellness professionals, managers, leaders, and HR on strategies for fostering psychological safety and well-being at work.

Diversity, Sensitivity, and Inclusion Training: Promoting Anti-Discrimination and Equity in the Workplace

This course offers your employees insight into the individual rights and responsibilities we all have when it comes to anti-discrimination, diversity, sensitivity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. It is designed to set the foundation for creating an inclusive and respectful work culture where every person can rise to their potential.

Volume-based discounts and your own fully branded versions to easily integrate into your on-boarding and training programs are also available. To explore and learn more about TalentEgg’s e-Learning offerings, click here.

And, If you are from a post-secondary institution or campus career centre, these courses and programs make a great addition to your career education offerings for students and recent alumni, as well add value to and build engagement within your institution’s own workplace. Click here to find out more.

As always, TalentEgg is here to support you in achieving your campus recruitment goals. Please do not hesitate to reach out to discuss your needs or to set-up a full walk through of all that TalentEgg and our e-Learning Academy have to offer.

Until next time…

How Are You Helping to Build the Workplace Critical Skills Pipeline?

When describing what differentiates top talent amongst students and new graduate candidates, we often find ourselves referencing their ‘soft’ or workplace critical skills. Things like creativity, teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, and leadership.

As employers, we seemingly all want these skills to be a part of the candidate profile for our new graduate programs, summer internships, or open positions on campus. And, if the expectation is that students come prepared with these skills when they arrive in the workplace, I wonder how can we as career educators and campus recruiters help students to identify, acquire, and nurture them before they land their first job?

For me, the approach is two-fold:

I think it starts with helping students to become fluent in the art of articulation, reflection, and offering up evidence.

Let’s work an example – communication skills. We know that having a student simply state they are a good communicator is not enough. Rather, it’s how they demonstrate they are a good communicator through examples or description that sets them apart.

Fellow campus recruiters, I am offering up a challenge to you here. Let’s commit to trying to better articulate our needs. Continuing with the ‘good communication skills’ example, what if we said something like this in our postings:

‘Persuasive business writing, active listening, comfort delivering critical or difficult messages, and strong presentation skills are essential for successful communication in our organization’.

The more specific or articulate we are, the more a student has got to work with and reflect on. They can start to assess whether they have demonstrated these skills and attributes in their studies or work to date, come up with evidence to support it, and if a gap exists, have a clearer goal to work towards. If Year 1 students knew what you were truly looking for in terms of workplace critical skills when they embarked on their program, think about where they might be by the time they graduate. Perhaps ‘top talent’ would be more plentiful?

While these notions are by no means new, it stands to reason that by providing students with ample opportunity to reflect on and to talk about their skills in meaningful ways (whether it is a part of their experiential learning, course work, co-op, or even workshops) the more comfortable and confident they will become in talking about their workplace critical skills as potential candidates.

The second piece is all about providing additional opportunities to develop and nurture workplace critical skills while in school. Case competitions, challenges, portfolios or workplace critical skills passports, skills badging, and experiential learning are all great ways to achieve this. Think about how you can get more involved in these types of initiatives. While yes, the time investment does need to be there to make it most effective, you will be doing wonders for your credibility, brand, and building up of the pipeline of the skills you’re ultimately wanting students to have in their toolkit.

Challenge yourself. In your next round of engaging students – how will you help them to get really good at articulating, reflecting, and evidencing their workplace critical skills? What opportunities will you provide to develop and nurture them? Happy skill building!

Trevor Buttrum is an award-winning career education and campus recruitment leader with 15+ years of experience in the space. He is currently the manager of a national program focused on building the talent pipeline for the next generation of the property and casualty insurance workforce.

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Today’s Talent, Tomorrow’s Leaders

Author: Trevor Buttrum

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