Upping The Stakes On Attracting College Recruits

In the current economic climate candidates have to work  harder than ever before for jobs.  There are more people looking and fewer jobs out there.  As an employer this means more applicants, but that alone doesn’t solve the traditional recruiting challenge of attracting the best applicants.  For larger companies this is an even bigger problem, one that I would liken to hunting for a needle in a haystack.  Not only is this a problem, it is an extremely expensive one.  Companies have to find ways to filter the good from the bad, and the exceptional from the good.

To do this some companies create rubrics for who they prefer to hire.  An example of this might be to primarily seek out people who attended top schools or who scored very high on the quantitative section of their college admissions tests.  Others might look for people who have taken an interest in their work beyond the norm.  In the case of a web designer that might mean that the individual took the time to create a web based portfolio of their work.  For a developer that could include examples of websites that they built or code samples from applications that they worked on (on their own time).

While many companies focus on obvious indicators of candidate quality or success factors like performance on a test during the application process, others proactively cast a net for people who fit their profile.  Take for example a the Microsoft Puzzle Challenge.  The company hosts a contest simultaneously on college campuses around the country inviting teams to compete by racing to solve puzzles (like this one) for prizes.

Here is a list of the schools where Microsoft hosts the competition:
Boston College
Boston University
Brown University
Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Cornell University
George Mason University
George Washington University
Georgetown University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Howard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Northeastern University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Stanford University
Texas A&M
University of Florida
University of Illinois (UC)
University of Maryland
University of Michigan
University of Texas
University of Toronto
University of Washington
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Based on the list of colleges alone the Microsoft team is bound to find a few good people.  For companies without the recruiting budget that Microsoft has it might be worthwhile to consider organizing targeted efforts in their region or online or both.

Update:
Some answers to the Microsoft Puzzles