On Campus Recruiting (at Cornell)

In an earlier post, I wrote about how to hire college kids once you get to the on-site stage and make an offer. In this post, I’ll discuss the beginning of the process. My perspective on this comes from watching companies recruit myself and other tech students at Cornell since Fall 2008. (I’m not sure how much of this is generalizable to other schools.)

Career Fairs

At Cornell, the process is often initiated through career fairs. There is one tech career fair each semester. Additionally, this year Cornell sent two bus-loads of tech students to NYC for NextJump’s SA500 career fair for east coast companies, hosted at the stock exchange. There will also be a startup career fair in Ithaca in February.

These career fairs are crucial - students typically go in to them and talk to the big names they’ve already heard of (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc), but will also wander about and talk to previously-unknown startups that have a cool looking booth / demo / swag. Even if they don’t end up applying to all these companies, students feel that this is a good way to get a sense of what’s out there. If your company doesn’t directly target mindshare of tech-oriented college students, like OPower or Akamai, it may be necessary to more aggressively get your name out there than a consumer-oriented startup, like Yelp or Instagram.

Students take time out of their busy schedules, often skipping class, to come to career fairs. Big names like Google or Facebook will be sought out by students, but smaller companies that students may not have heard of will need to work harder to get people to visit their booth. When a student is just floating between booths, they decision of which to visit will be fairly superficial, based on an immediate gut reaction rather than any rational analysis of your company. A good-looking booth filled with awesome swag and attractive/intelligent looking people can really help here.

Shot Glasses and T-shirts: What to Have in Your Booth

Students will circulate throughout the career fair, greeting one another. (Don’t ambush students who are just milling around and talk at them for 40 minutes without giving them a chance to break away.) As a student, many other students I encounter fall in to the “we see each other in class but don’t otherwise really hang out” category. For these encounters, talking about which companies have the best swag is a great conversation starter. As a recruiter, whatever swag you make visible to students walking by will be broadcast peer-to-peer throughout the rest of the crowd. If your swag is great, you can cause people to seek you out, the same way they seek out the respected tech giants. (At SA500, ZocDoc quickly drew attention to itself by handing out $100 to anyone who could answer their interview questions. People were going to try it even if they didn’t think they’d be interested in ZocDoc, which gave the CEO a chance to make his pitch. In terms of eye-catching swag, a row of $20s works quite well.)

What constitutes “great swag” is a matter of taste, and largely depends on what image you want to portray for your startup. My personal favorite swag is a brushed green glass shot glass from Palantir. Pong balls are also a classic. (Better to stay away from drug paraphnelia - ha.) Many startups advertise themselves as a laid-back alternative to the drab, stuffy business world. Cornell is all about “work hard, play hard”, and if your startup can provide both, it will appeal to students. T-Shirts are also essential. At the Fall 2011 career fair, Dropbox spammed t-shirts to anyone who walked up, and since then you can’t walk across the engineering quad without seeing someone wearing one. This is a great way to get your name in front of students who may not otherwise have heard of you.

In addition to swag, it helps to prepare a small printed card that advertises working at your company. Students can read this while they are waiting in line to talk to you, thus saving you from having to repeat “we are based in Seattle, WA” a million times, and they can bring the cards home with them, to jog their memory after the career fair. A long day of talking to employers can make them all blur together, but having some specific written points about each one can help keep things straight. This card answer the following questions:

• In what geographic areas are your job openings?
• What do you build?
• How do you build it? (What tools / technologies do you use?)
• What is the company culture? What are the sweet perks?

If a student has never heard of your company but is intrigued by your awesome swag, the first question on their mind will likely be “what exactly do you do?” Having a demo really helps here. Even if your app’s value only becomes apparent after the user has been using it for a while, like Trello, log in to the app with a fake user so students can play around with it.

Bring Alums

Bring alums of the school you’re visiting from your company to staff the booth. Younger alums may still have personal connections to the students. If a student sees, “Hey, that girl at the Moat booth was my great TA for CS 2110”, he’ll be more likely to go up and talk to her, and to think highly of the company in question. Having booth staffers be alums of the school you’re visiting gives them an instant common ground with candidates.

Finding Interesting Candidates Amongst Career Fair Contacts

If you’re recruiting coders, don’t be afraid to ask technical questions right during the initial contact at the booth. It shows that you are serious about getting the best people. I would structure it something like this:

Talk to the candidate for a few minutes to get a general sense of who they are.

Can they solve FizzBuzz in less than two minutes? If yes, continue, else thank them for their time and discard their resume.

Can they solve a more difficult question (should take around 10 minutes)? If yes, put them on the “special list”, else throw their resumes in the heap.

At the end of the day, take the top 10 candidates from the special list, and invite them out to dinner. (Your alum co-workers should be able to recommend somewhere good to eat. The choice of where to eat will also contribute to the image your company gives.) Use the time at dinner to get to know them better, and to give them a chance to learn more about your company. It should be fun and relaxed - don’t ask them any interview-style questions, but it’s fine to casually discuss the technical details of the students’ latest projects.

At this point, it’s up to however you structure your process, but as long as you’re on campus, I’d recommend staying a few extra days and doing on-campus interviews with as many promising-looking candidates as possible. At Cornell, the Campus Career Services office provides interview rooms for visiting companies. I personally find in-person interviews to be much more pleasant than phone screens, and going to NYC or further for a first-round onsite is a pain, unless I’m incredibly enthusiastic about the company.

Other Campus Events

Big name companies often have events like tech talks / info sessions, ice cream socials, or trivia nights. In Fall 2011, a bunch of companies set up video game stations in Duffield for a more informal way to interact with students. Tech talks are a great way to show off your engineering accomplishments, and give students a sense of your company’s software development philosophy. However, Cornell students are typically extremely pressed for time, so if your brand isn’t as well known, it may be tough to attract a big enough crowd to fill an auditorium. It’s hard to go too far wrong with anything that involves giving away free food that tastes good. (People joke that career fair week is the “ACSU meal plan”.)

Side note: for some reason, even big companies with plenty of money insist on buying shitty pizza from Domino’s for their tech talks. Why? Does anyone really enjoy it?

Bigger companies often have student ambassador programs, where they pay on-campus students a nominal fee to represent them and organize events year-round. I’ve never done this, but some people enjoy it.

Facebook recently started doing on-campus hackathons. They bring a bunch of engineers, who help students complete projects in 24 hours, then award prizes to the winners. This is a great way for students to form personal relationships with employees, and it gives employees a way to see students’ thought process first-hand. For Facebook, it also allows them to showcase their “hacker culture”.

Really, as long as your company lets its culture shine through, everything should be fine. Unless you use MUMPS. ha.