Why Campus Recruiters Should Market More to Gut Instincts

How do you make important decisions? How do you REALLY make those decisions? Do you develop a carefully calculated process to weigh various options and then select the one with the highest score? Or do you start along that track and then let your gut instincts take over? How do you imagine that students make decisions about their job choices? The truth is that gut instinct plays a far greater role in just about every decision than any of us like to admit. Effective recruiting means marketing to that gut instinct.

On the evolutionary time scale, our intellect is still in its infancy while our gut instinct is so mature that we don’t even notice it making decisions for us. Of course, “gut” is a misnomer that seems to imply that our instinctive decisions are not worthy of the brain where they are actually processed. Although we may have grown to accept that “rational” decisions are better in the sophisticated modern world, we wouldn’t last a day without our “gut” decisions to guide us. Before I get way too far outside my own expertise, I’ll simply refer you to a great book published last year by Dan Gardner, a journalist from Ottawa, entitled “Risk: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.” (In the U.S. it was published with the title, “The Science of Fear.”) In a nutshell, he asserts that although we live in a safer world than ever, our illogical fear is also greater than ever – and causing some bad decisions.

Whether or not you agree that students’ career choices are made more by gut instinct than rational calculation, chances are that you are not speaking enough to the instinctive, emotional side of the brain. I was quite impressed a year and a half ago by a student in a focus group who indicated that salary was way down on his list of 10 criteria he used to evaluate job offers. I wasn’t so much impressed by salary being low on his list (that’s true of many students), but what impressed me was the simple fact that he even created such a list and scored the offers against it. That sounds pretty rational, but what was on that list? Quite simply, a lot of things that can’t be measured or easily compared.

(As an aside, one of the reasons students often appear to focus on salary is the same reason that employers focus on GPA more than they admit: these things are easily measured.)

Our research, and that of others, consistently shows such things as work-life balance, great people to work with, and interesting work as top criteria for graduating students. Not surprisingly in the current economic climate, the importance of “secure employment” has risen significantly. But none of these things can be easily measured, if at all. Ultimately, how students feel about these things is what will influence their decisions. How they feel about you and anyone else they meet from your company will therefore be tremendously important. What they hear from friends, family, and professors will also be highly impactful. And how they imagine themselves feeling when they tell those people where they’ve landed a job will also be critical.

My firm, Brainstorm Consulting, in partnership with DECODE, recently presented our clients with the 2009 edition of our “From Learning to Work Report” based on a survey of 16,000 Canadian university and college students. (Note to U.S. readers: I work and correspond work many U.S. experts and I am confident that these findings would be consistent on both sides of the border.) In our research, we analyzed dozens of criteria that influence students’ employer choice and job decisions. This resulted in the development of 6 groups of co-related criteria that we refer to as the 6 drivers of employer attractiveness. With almost all students, the number one driver is something we call “livability”. In a nutshell, livabililty is all about things that can’t be easily measured such as great people to work with, work-life balance, and a comfortable work environment. Marketing your livability means marketing what it feels like to work in your organization.

So how do you market such things as livability to students? How do you market to students’ gut rather than just their intellect? Well, of course Coca-Cola, Apple, VW and all the big brands create loyalty through massively expensive campaigns that consistently connect with our “heart strings” through mass media. So if you’ve got a great consumer brand and your target recruits love that brand, then you may be way ahead (although not everyone who loves a brand wants to work for the company).

Whether you have a great consumer brand you can leverage or not, the key here is to realize that although choosing an employer is a much bigger decision than choosing a soft drink or ketchup, employers must speak to the gut to create a powerful employment brand and have a profound influence on students’ decisions. And the way to do that is through simple true stories told in a personal way that create an image of work and a workplace that students can get passionate about and proud to be a part of. You may not have the budget to produce a heart-wrenching ad campaign, but if you work in a place worth working in then you are surrounded by stories – many of them your own personal stories – that will get students excited, even passionate, about joining you.

How, where, and when you tell those stories is a whole other matter…