Tips to Increase Student Engagement at College Career Events

Do you spend hours on hours organizing your college career events only to have them fall short of expected attendance goals? Are you frustrated on how to more effectively market these well-thought-out events to students? Do you hear students forget—or worse—never hear about the event?

Below are some quick and easy tips to increase student engagement at college career events. These tips are designed not to serve as a policy statement or blueprint for a college career center, but to help you improve your school’s anchor not only on event attendance but student engagement as well. Increasing student engagement with career events will provide an incentive for companies to invest time and resources on your campus. This will only improve your bottom line of connecting students and employers.

Here are a few tips on making your events vital and viable to students (and companies):

1. Pinpoint your marketing channels

Many college career centers will market where everyone reads: bulletin boards, emails, Twitter or Facebook. However, this method may not work so well as students get bombarded with so much information. Your career events get lost in the noise. For something as important as students’ careers, it is imperative to create a separate channel where the students can follow and potentially get notified when an event is not only created, but changed as well. Cut through the clutter using mobile web technology.

2. Focus your career events

It is impossible to pigeonhole a student to a single interest. But, it is easy to organize an event with a focus: engineering, hackathons, tech talk, etc. If it’s an engineering career fair, for example, make sure companies attending are primarily hiring for engineers. An event should not be organized for every student, in fact, it may be better to have smaller, but frequent, events throughout the school year. Once students understand that their industry, company or job of choice is at the event, they will naturally be more inclined to continue looking for updates for the particular event. Make it so students are looking out for your events, not the other way around.

3. Offer students a social platform

It is a common misconception that students keep their job search private. In fact, the trend is quite the opposite. Due to the increased competition, students are keen to help others, hoping that others will help when the opportunity presents itself. Social networking is a powerfully strong force, so does your college have an interactive approach to students’ friends marketing an event for you?

In conclusion, college career centers owe it to themselves to look into web technologies available to help colleges help students discover and track career events on campus. With these technologies, students have the ability to:

• View career events chronologically or by interest
• Add events (and reminders) to their personal calendars
• Share their events with their social networks and friends
• Be part of a college’s ‘career community’

At the same time, these same web technologies – especially when part of the college’s CMS – can help colleges analyze the effectiveness of their events, such as determining how many times students view and attend events, or which types of events do students like to attend.

How are you using technology at your college to reach your students and promote all the great things going on at your career events?

Editor's note: Mounza recently became a marketing partner with SchoolNow CMS for higher education (and K-12) to help colleges promote their career events using advanced web technologies. Geared specifically for the mobile user, Mounza is actually being integrated into the SchoolNow offering for any college looking to increase student engagement and improve the success of its career events.