BEST PRACTICES

BEST PRACTICES for Successful Recruitment Identifying and Proactively Recruiting Top Students  Draw on a variety of recruiting mechanisms including your website, targeted mailings, telephone calls, posters, advertisements, receptions at professional conferences.  Contact colleagues at other universities and your graduate alumni. Ask for names and email addresses of their top students and follow up with emails and telephone calls to those students encouraging them to apply to your program. An evening or weekend faculty telethon to call prospective students generates a large number of contacts in a short period of time. Make it fun and faculty may be willing to participate again the next year! Consider the quality and diversity of your undergraduate population as a potential recruitment pool. Invite seniors with a 3.5 GPA to a Recruitment Day Clinic to help them prepare competitive applications. Advertise your degree programs to ASU undergraduates in related disciplines. Use regional and national databases to identify top students who are underrepresented in your discipline. The Graduate College has databases with strong students who participate in the McNair Scholars, Western and National Name Exchanges, Project 1000, and NIH-MARC STAR programs. Obtain lists of potential students interested in your programmatic areas and follow up with targeted letters, emails, and phone calls. If you can afford the additional expense, consider advertising in professional conference proceedings (e.g., in your discipline and in interdisciplinary programs focused on increasing diversity, such as Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and Engineering [SACNAS]) and in guides to graduate studies. You may also purchase listings of top applicants in your field from sources such as the Educational Testing Service. Review conference proceedings for your professional associations (national and regional) to identify student presenters. These are likely to be strong students who are already socialized into the profession. If they are undergraduates or master’s degree students, consider targeting them for recruitment. Electronic Prospective Request Forms: These provide a quick means for students to provide relevant information, in person or on-line, allowing you to match potential students with faculty and current graduate students. To recruit local talent, consider radio advertisements. Branding: Be consistent on all publications. Develop a PowerPoint presentation about your program that your faculty and students can show at conferences and when visiting other universities. This will help them to be effective recruiters.           Create an Informative, Welcoming, and Transparent Website  Website should load quickly and be easily navigable.   Test your website. Do popular search engines (e.g., Google) return with your website if you provide keywords students in your field might use? Showcase diversity within your program through articles and pictures of faculty and students. Many students want to see evidence that you have an inclusive, welcoming environment. Post group pictures of faculty and students working together on various projects. page 1 of 3 Best Practices for Successful Recruitment 2/7/05 Update: 2/12/08     Make sure it is easy to find faculty interests and recent publications. Include graduate student accomplishments (e.g., publications, awards). Stories and testimonials from current students and alumni are persuasive. State the percentage of graduate students receiving funding (assistantships and fellowships), placements of graduates, time-to-degree, and completion rates for your program. Also provide a profile of your students, including number of master’s and doctoral students broken out by gender, ethnicity, international, etc. All of this is available at the unit level on the Academic Program Profile online data set. Post your Graduate Student Handbook. The handbook should include program requirements and policies (e.g., satisfactory performance, criteria for allocating teaching and research assistantships, criteria for allocating travel awards, office/lab space and other resources). Make your website interactive, such that potential students can enter their area of interest and link directly to faculty and graduate students in that subarea. Organize lists of faculty and graduate students by area of interest so potential students can identify and contact those with similar interests, and provide links to faculty and graduate student email addresses. Provide a link from your website to the Graduate College graduate application. If you do not already have a program-specific Supplemental Application as part of the general application, contact the GC for assistance in developing it. Include a Frequently Asked Questions section to your website. Update your website regularly.      Responding to Inquiries   Students expect a response within 24 hours of their email or phone call. Ascertain the area of interest and/or names of specific faculty with whom the students would like to work. Link them to faculty and graduate students in their area of interest immediately. Make timely (24 hours or less) responses from faculty the norm within your unit. This personal attention is critical to recruiting top students. Maintain a Recruitment Log on each student to ensure that potential students received timely call backs/emails and are in communication with those faculty and students who can provide the most accurate and complete answers to their questions. Your current graduate students are your best “sales” people. Involve them in the recruitment process. Set up a free AOL or Yahoo Instant Messaging account and answer questions instantly for one hour a day or more.    Think in Advance about Your Selection and Admission Process  What is the “right size” cohort for your program, based on the number of new students your faculty can mentor, the number of students you can support with assistantships, desired class sizes, and average time-to-degree?   What is your yield ratio (# new students enrolled / # admits)? Use this information to determine how many students you should admit to reach your desired cohort size. Determine which indicators are the best predictors of success in your program (e.g., are GRE scores relevant to success? Grades in specific courses? Research experience?). Ask students to provide a statement of purpose as part of their application. This allows students to demonstrate strengths that might not be apparent in a quick review of GPA and test scores. Are you placing your students in desirable positions? If not, what changes can you make in your student selection and program requirements? Know your competition. Survey your peers to ascertain the stipends they offer to TAs/RAs. Do they offer fellowships? Summer support? page 2 of 3   Best Practices for Successful Recruitment 2/7/05 Update: 2/12/08  Survey or call prospective students who turned you down. Where did they go, and why did they select another university instead of your program? Increase Your Likelihood of Success  Unless you have a very early application deadline, don’t wait for applications to be complete before you start reviewing them to look for strong candidates. When you find excellent students whose applications are not complete, contact them to indicate your interest in their candidacy and encourage them to complete the application.   Make your admissions decisions early—before your competition. Make teaching/research assistantship offers early, preferably at the time of the admission decision. Use the standard offer letter available on the Graduate College website to ensure that the students receive all necessary information in the offer letter. Look for funding sources to supplement departmental funds (e.g., university fellowships, TA in related fields of study, Graduate College Underrepresented Graduate Enrichment Match [UGEM] funds). Develop an annual recruitment week or weekend.   Invite Potential Students for a Recruitment Visit     Bring your top recruits to campus at the same time—this builds a cohort feeling among the new recruits and increases the likelihood that they will accept your offer. February and March are ideal months for recruitment visits—the weather is typically great, and it is often cold and slushy elsewhere in the country. Set up individual meetings for each recruit with faculty and graduate students with similar interests. Involve faculty and graduate students in the recruitment visit. Showcase graduate student achievements through a poster session and/or focused working group discussions which involve the new recruits. Make a presentation outlining the accomplishments and exciting directions in the program. Offer a mix of social and academic activities (e.g., potluck dinner at a faculty member’s home, hike or softball game, small group discussions). For one lunch during the visit, arrange to have a graduate student with similar areas of interest take the recruit to lunch. Provide them with money for lunch at a restaurant of their choice on or near campus. Invite relevant colleagues to meet with potential students (e.g., your dean’s office to discuss how the program fits into the college’s strategic initiatives; Graduate College to discuss professional development opportunities and financing graduate studies). Provide potential students an opportunity to meet with students and faculty in other disciplines, either through your own interdisciplinary initiatives or drawing on the various graduate student associations (e.g., leadership of the Black, Latino/a, and American Indian Graduate Student Associations). If the timing works for your program, you might have your recruitment week/weekend coincide with ASU’s annual Graduate and Professional Student Appreciation Week (generally late March). There are many activities planned for graduate students during this week including a picnic, TA Appreciation lunch, and research symposia. Follow up with emails and phone calls when the student returns home telling them you enjoyed meeting them and hope they will decide to come to ASU. Ask if there are any further questions you can answer. Sponsor a Graduate Networking Conference. Contact other academic units to collaborate on a joint event. For example, ASU Justice Studies and Gender Studies co-sponsored a Graduate Networking Conference for Justice Studies and Gender Studies Graduate Students. page 3 of 3        Best Practices for Successful Recruitment 2/7/05 Update: 2/12/08