Lattice

A serious question for you: what should your recruitment team and The Avengers have in common? 

We hope your answer isn’t fashion sense, although if you’ve been wearing capes to any student fairs recently, that’s certainly one way to attract attention! 

The Avengers know the secret to a powerful team: skill diversity. As you build your own roster of recruitment superheroes, it is important to consider the specific “superpowers” needed to be effective at each stage  of the recruitment funnel. And yes, each stage is different. Ensuring that you have the right staff member in the right place at the right time will be paramount to achieving your enrollment goals. 

So, what are these superpowers, you ask? 

We’ve created a helpful infographic to guide you through team roles and needed skills at each stage of the funnel. Use it to assess your own team structure and identify areas for professional development. Keep this funnel in mind as you draft job descriptions and make hiring decisions and remember to consider both the hard and soft skills new team members may bring to the table. 

Avengers assemble! And read on… 

We’ve all heard about how company culture eats company strategy for lunch, yeah? People are everything. How we achieve our strategic differentiation and meet our institutional goals really comes down to the team we have to do the work (the team that creates and delivers the product). 

An interesting observation here: within any industry, organizations really are all the same, right?  

Sure, there are categorical differences: think 2-year vs 4-year in higher ed, community vs specialty hospital in healthcare – but these categorizations, when you get down to it, are not that significant, right? They are all ultimately producing the same thing in the same ways in the end. 

Raising an eyebrow? You should be. Yet, you know there are marketers out there – perhaps even among your circles – who see marketing as rinse and repeat, cookie cutter stuff that simply requires you to replace one logo with another and voila, new campaign.  

These cynical marketers will tell you the standard storyline is this: 

• We really care about you and your family. 
• We have fabulous faculty/staff/nurses/surgeons/tech. 
• You will get the results you want. 

Those ideas can be delivered with a whole bunch of hype and glitz. Fancy videos presented with digital ad campaigns. You know the drill. 

And if this is all you have, your institution truly is just like all the others and your marketing plan truly is the type of thing that allows a marketing agency to take one institution’s marketing plan, swap out the logo, and Boom! There’s a fresh marketing plan. Ugh. 

Every CFO’s dilemma: how much discounting do we have to do to fill our classes?

But before you get there, it is the Enrollment Management team’s job to answer a few other questions:

1. To whom do we market? (this takes us from suspect to application)
2. Whom do we accept? (this takes us from applicant to accepted pool)
3. And now we turn to the CFO and financial aid team to answer, “How much do we award them?” (this takes us from accepted to tuition-paying)

Private institutions have faced, and will continue to face, a world of trouble in the years ahead. If you are not clear about what makes your institution highly valuable to your target audience (and no, the answer is not, “we provide a personalized level of attention to our students”), then your classrooms and dorms are going to look sparser. Those doubles you converted to triples will be double again. 

And for other institutions, those with lower price points, there are significant headwinds in terms of how students and parents are evaluating your value as well. Competition will continue to grow. 

With this post we share our concern, and it should be yours as well, that the marketing agencies offering enrollment/recruitment services for so many institutions are taking their marketing plans from their most recent client and applying them to the next one that comes in the door. 

Literally, some of them are simply slapping your logo on the marketing plan they delivered to the client that came before you and selling it to you as something unique and fresh. They are that  cynical about their own work and what you are doing on your campus. 🙄 

Read on for tips on how to frame the pertinent questions and approach the answers for your institution. While the framework has common elements for all, the resulting marketing plan must be different based on your specific institution type, location, ranking and academic strengths, tuition, culture, etc. 

In our prior blog, we hit the road towards our strategic destination fueled by the proper tactics to keep us on the right track. While strategy and tactics are required to make the trip, they are also very different tools.

Tactical thinking vs. strategic thinking is similar to “which comes first, the chicken or the egg”. One cannot exist without

the other. A strategy needs to be in place before you can determine the ideal tactics to achieve your goal. By the same token, your goal may not be achieved unless you employ the proper tactics. They are different and essential tools to employ in every short and long term business plan.

You take a deep breath, and slowly push your seat away from the desk. Your inbox is empty, your notifications are cleared, your texts are returned and you have nothing else to do in this moment than reflect on your strategic plan and think about where you want your business to be in five years.