How in the world are we going to recruit students with limited standardized testing, no travel, and hybrid visit opportunities? That’s a common question looming among enrollment management leaders across the country; especially as enrollment professionals attempt to prepare for fall recruitment season – and, let’s be clear, there’s not a moment to waste. There are road blocks and barriers around every corner preventing colleges from getting in front of prospective students and families.
On top of that, it’s likely that admission teams across the country are overwhelmed by these seismic changes in the nature of the recruitment business; the pivot last spring to complete the cycle remotely has been fatiguing. On top of that, on August 1 admission teams were asked to begin again – this time in an industry that is forever changed.
An important fact to remember is – a new recruitment cycle has already started and it is bound to be very different than any other in the past. So, how do enrollment leaders respond to the shifting environment in order to recruit the class? It’s time to ask ourselves a few questions:
- How can we secure search names and cultivate inquiries when standardized test dates continue to cancel?
- How can we create and invite students to engaging and immersive interactive campus experiences when our faculty are teaching hybrid courses and our staff are not on campus?
- How can we use the information we have and know about our leads and our data analytic processes to enhance and direct our recruitment efforts in a tumultuous cycle?
Now, more than ever, enrollment management success is going to include a mix of art and science; creativity coupled with clear analytics. It’s time to look at what we do know – declining demographics, fluctuations in prospective student behavior given the current environment, and the wide-ranging challenges in the market during a pandemic – and ask ourselves what more we need to know – what new strategies can we implement to generate leads, what will the market invest in, and what does an innovative recruitment cycle look like in practice?
Contact us to learn more from our enrollment specialists how you can harness creativity and analytics to navigate and answer the need to know questions in this very different and complex recruitment cycle.