How Colleges Can Make the Recruiting Process More Equitable: 3 Solutions
What if there was a way to level the playing field for all students in the college recruiting process? In this article, a Staffing Recruiter and a CEO provide their expert opinions on how to achieve this goal. Discover the first insight on increasing outreach to underserved schools and the final insight on employers evolving beyond GPA and school bias. Read on to uncover all three insights from these industry leaders.
- Increase Outreach to Underserved Schools
- Provide Equal Access to Free Resources
- Employers Evolving Beyond GPA and School Bias
Increase Outreach to Underserved Schools
Colleges can make the recruiting process more equitable by increasing outreach to schools with limited college counseling resources that may be in rural areas or low-income neighborhoods. This approach would allow for more diversity and help to bridge the gap between resources available in affluent and underfunded schools. Many students in underserved communities lack access to information about college options, financial aid, or application processes. Proactive outreach ensures they are informed and feel support from universities as they navigate the college process. This strategy helps ensure that all students, regardless of their location or school resources, have equal access to higher education opportunities.
Provide Equal Access to Free Resources
One thing colleges can do to promote an equal playing field would be to give the same access and free resources to all students looking to find a new position out of school. This would include help with resume and LinkedIn writing, and interview prep in person and virtually. In addition, students would have free access to mentors who can help guide them along the way.
Employers Evolving Beyond GPA and School Bias
The process that employers and college career service offices follow varies from school to school and has also evolved over the years at most schools. Most of that evolution has been positive for those, like me, who want to see a more equitable recruiting process.
Untiil a few years ago, it was very common for employers to strongly prefer to hire candidates whose grade point averages exceeded some number, who were enrolled in a particular major, and who attended a short list of schools. For example, an employer might strongly prefer to hire students with GPAs exceeding 3.5 who were enrolled in a mechanical engineering program and attended schools A, B, or C. Any candidates who did not satisfy all of those requirements might have been able to apply and perhaps may have been considered, but the likelihood of them actually being hired was slim to none.
Today, most employers no longer care about GPA as they've found that it wasn't well correlated to work performance and sometimes even negatively correlated. Those with the highest GPAs are also those most likely to hop from one job to another, so they often didn't stay with an employer nearly as many years as those whose GPAs were lower, so the lower GPA cohort was actually the more productive.
Similarly, more and more employers have become major and even school agnostic for many of their roles. Now, if you want to be an engineer, you need to be in an engineering major as that profession requires licensures. Nursing, law, accounting, and some others do too. But, if you're looking to start your career in sales as more students do than any other occupational field, you can literally graduate with any major. And employers have discovered that major is also poorly correlated with workplace productivity, so many of them no longer care about your major.
Finally, more and more employers are becoming school agnostic, meaning that they don't really care what school you attend. Sure, they're most likely to interview you if you attend the school across the street but if you have some kind of tie to the city in which the role is located, most are now happy to interview you via Zoom. Before Covid, few employers and candidates made a practice of interviewing via platforms such as Zoom, but now virtually all do and are very comfortable doing so.
