I recently came across a report I received last year on effective recruitment tactics for graduate students. What struck me about the report were the results about the telephone as a tactic in recruitment.
The report, produced by Noel Levitz, had institutions rate the effectiveness of phone calls from recruitment professionals as well as from faculty members (two separate ratings). Of the private master's-level institutions, 88% indicated they used recruiters to call inquiries, while only 50% indicated they had professors phone inquiries.
For institutions indicating they made phone calls by
recruiters, 95% said the calls were effective tools in their recruitment, where as 88% of the institutions with faculty members calling said the tactic was effective. Those are strong numbers.
This spring, one of the 4DP interns helped coordinate our secret shopping experiment as his project for the semester. He inquired with 25 different institutions. Two of those institutions were for-profit, online universities, while the remaining institutions were non-profit and located between the Mid-Atlantic and northeastern US.
As part of the project, he collected information about the quantity and frequency of phone calls each institution made before "giving up" with no response, how many and how often the institutions emailed and the types of physical mailing pieces each school sent.
For the purpose of this post, I will share that 70% of the non-profit institutions actually phoned. (Please note that the Noel Levitz study was focused solely on graduate programs, whereas our secret shopping study included both master's as well as bachelor-level programs.)
When I speak to the program leaders at institutions that don't include phone calls as part of their communications plan, I am always surprised at the resistance when I make the recommendation to add this medium.
Almost always, those institutions are facing more dramatic enrollment deficits than those who do call, and simply based on the information from the Noel Levitz study, the tactic is perceived as a very effective tool.
In order for your message to reach prospective students, you need a certain number of "touch points," and you need a variety of channels for those points to make a connection. It's the same with recruitment. You need to have multiple attempts to connect and engage your prospects - including email as well as phone.
Institutions who do not call prospects are limiting their ability to convert inquiries to applicants, and applicants to students because they are ignoring one of, if not the most, important channel to engage them. Should you call all prospects? Maybe not, but in those situations, you need the capabilities to segment your prospects effectively.
If you have questions about your recruitment process, or Fourth Dimension Partner's Secret Shopping Experiment, complete the form and we will contact you.