Meet & Greet Strategies for Employers

Recruitment Season is fast approaching!! This post has tips for employers to maximise their time meeting & greeting students at our upcoming recruitment events.

We recommend you bring 2 people per internship role, because you will be BUSY- lots of students will want to talk to you!

To make yourselves identifiable:

• If possible, wear branded clothing so that you’re easily identifiable.
• Bring a pull-up banner so that your logo/organisation name is visible from a distance. Stand near your banner!
• You’ll have a trestle table, and you’re welcome to bring marketing collateral, demo items, or giveaways for students, but that’s not expected.
• We’ll have maps/directions available for students so they can find you on the night. It’s best if you have your organisational profile and internship roles listed on our website at least 2 weeks before M&G so that students have time to do some research and get excited & prepared to talk to you!

Here’s some tips for employers to be strategic & maximise your time at Meet & Greet:

• You will meet a LOT of students and it will be very hard to remember who’s who! We suggest you make a plan for how you’re going to classify yes/no/maybe candidates so that you remember who you want to follow up with.
• We have a mobile App available for Android and iOS users, but we suggest you have a manual system, too. App instructions will be sent to everyone who is registered for Meet & Greet before the event. With the app, you can scan QR codes (which is a link to student profiles on our website), assign “tags” to candidates, rate them with a smiley face, bookmark their profiles for future reference, and attach them to a specific job that you have listed on the website. There’s also space for “notes” but we don’t think you’ll have much time to enter notes.
• We have pre-loaded some attribute “Tags” in the app, including Analytic, Big picture, Creative, Empathic, Engaging, Knowledgeable, Passionate, Prepared, Reserved, Technical. You can delete these and create your own. Tags are team-wide, so we suggest you agree as a team what these are going to be before the event.
• We recommend that students bring “business cards” (and we’ve said they don’t have to be fancy, just functional, so please don’t judge!) The best manual back-up system we know of is have a yes/no pocket system, or if your chosen outfit doesn’t have pockets, then boxes/jars/containers/piles on your table that you can file the cards into. We suggest they’re not labelled Yes/No as that’s fairly demoralising to students on the night!
• You can also bring a pen to write notes on business cards, and we will have stationery available on the night if needed.

After Meet & Greet:

• We’ll be organising Speed Interviews (in Wellington & Auckland this year) and this is optional but a great way to get your long list down to a short list of people that you want to run through your regular recruitment process.
• You can register for Speed Interviews the day after Meet & Greet, and select who you want us to invite.
• The best way to manage your candidates is via your Job “Prospects” page – it’s like a mini applicant tracking system built into our website.
• Please make time to complete your interviews and be ready to make Offers on Offers Day!!

Check out this post for more tips on attracting TOP CANDIDATES to your internship role.