Addison Group is a professional staffing and consulting firm in the United States, specializing in connecting companies with professional candidates for contract, contract-to-hire, and direct hire positions. Addison Group has expanded its reach significantly across the country with over 20 offices, growing by one to three new offices per year. Because of that, they have a big charter to fill entry-level recruiting roles in each of those offices.
Addison Group’s entry-level hiring model is a pretty unique one: Internal employees start off as recruiters and move into Sales or Senior Recruiter roles around the year mark after starting. Each role is seen as critical to the business, where recruiters are more candidate-focused while sales team members are more client-focused. Addison Group has an 80% promotion rate. According to Katie Kocmond, Campus Recruitment Manager at Addison Group:
“This model also allows the sales team to fully understand and become an expert in their services before being promoted.”
Katie Kocmond
Prior to becoming a Handshake Premium partner, Addison Group had a strong focus on recruiting college students, but lacked the process and dedicated team to fill the high volume of openings they had for entry-level roles. The business knew it needed to get the brand in front of this student audience; the internal recruiting team was partnering with the field and sending people to campus events, where they were collecting paper resumes and hoping the right people came to speak with them. As such, employer brand page views were lower than they’d hoped for.
Creating a proactive campus recruiting philosophy and team
With the onset of the idea to have full entry-level start classes in Addison, Katie knew they needed a solution in place to help their small team become more proactive ahead of the fall recruiting season. And in March of 2018, she established the campus recruitment function at Addison Group.
Now, Handshake Premium allows Katie and her team to not only engage the most qualified candidates before showing up to events, but also define that list of priority student profiles and automate the work before the busy fall recruiting season. They’re particularly fond of the ability to designate a student’s graduation month and their location preferences in their Segments. For Katie, the biggest benefit she sees is through Campaigns; Addison Group sees a 65% message open rate.
“Being able to run a campaign prior to the career fair, have a student look at our brand page and then click RSVP is such a welcome change.”
Katie Kocmond
Data-driven campus recruiting
In addition to proactive sourcing and engagement, Addison Group leverages the analytics that Handshake Premium provides to continue to enhance their campus recruiting strategy. With their dedicated Handshake Customer Success Manager, the campus recruiting team can now understand what cities students want to work in as well as how they’re performing across different majors and campuses to optimize their new program. They’re even using analytics to decide which career fairs to attend -- and which not to attend.
That data-driven approach has also helped Addison Group gain more brand exposure with this student and early talent audience. As they open new offices every year, it’s important for the business to ensure their culture transcends throughout each space and is constant across the company. Addison Group has always been defined by its strong culture, but now students have a better view into that unique culture and can actually envision how they would fit in and contribute. Because of their expanded efforts, Addison Group has seen a 4.5X increase in employer profile views from fall 2017 compared to fall 2018.
With at least 1 hire per new office from Handshake, Addison Group is exposing their company to this audience in a way they never have before:
“Hearing a student say ‘I’ve heard of you’ or ‘you contacted me through Handshake’ is a testament to the fact that our efforts are paying off.”
Katie Kocmond