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Lamb Weston, a global potato product supplier, has made its brand more recognizable to students on Handshake despite its lean team of three university recruiters—with 20,000+ applications in 2023 and a 22% job view to application rate.

So, how does Lamb Weston achieve campus recruiting efficiencies with its small but mighty team—and earn a 2024 Handshake Early Talent Award alongside brands with household names?

Check out this Q&A with Nate Pedronan, Talent Acquisition Project Manager at Lamb Weston, for key takeaways on:

Developing a consistent messaging and outreach strategy that makes a lesser known brand memorable to students

Leveraging hybrid tactics by blending digital engagement with on-site presence

Using Handshake data to test messaging tactics and expand school partnerships to build a stronger pipeline

Providing a comprehensive internship program that includes mentorship, projects that are meaningful to the business, and day-in-the-life exposure

Q&A: Small team, big wins with Lamb Weston

Can you share how your small team achieves impressive engagement levels, particularly through messaging with students?

It always starts with the team, right? We have a small team of three that hires for 30-50 interns every year. Having a strategy and message with that team is first and foremost. It's our mission as a group to inspire passion for early career development. And I think that carries on through all of our messaging, how we interact with students when we're on campus. If you don't have a team that's saying the same thing…it becomes very confusing in terms of the candidate experience.

Tell us about how you evolved your campus recruiting strategy to include digital engagement.

We learned a lot from COVID. Campus was shut down, we couldn't do anything on-site. So we moved our strategy to fully virtual [and asked ourselves]: Are there virtual internships that we can do? And if there are virtual internships, how do we reach those students? I'm happy there's a return to campus, but we were still able to take our lessons learned from moving to digital. And now we have this cool hybrid approach.

How do you attract students to jobs in the manufacturing industry?

You may not have heard of our company before, but I guarantee you, if you have ever eaten a French fry in your life, you probably have eaten one of our products.


It's funny because you know, we go on campus and our booth always gets like this weird side eye if they've never seen us before…like, “tell me why I care about potatoes!” But everybody likes French fries, so it's hard to not have fun with it. They'll remember that crazy potato company that invited you to a virtual info session and had really animated people excited about french fries.

Your job locations are primarily outside of major metro areas. How do you build a  pipeline of students interested in working where your plants are?

Our plants are located primarily in the Pacific Northwest and in some rural locations where it might be hard to find talent. Historically there was a list of schools that business leaders would tell us to go to because they're in our backyard. But we're pigeonholing ourselves by just looking at these schools. We were able to leverage Handshake to open up our radius to where we can’t make it on site.

For example, students that might be from our local area but are going to school somewhere else—we were missing that candidate pool. What about students that might be coming from military backgrounds that genuinely are open to relocating? We’ve used messages to find interested students from a variety of different locations, not in our backyard. We started to incorporate that into our on-site strategy and say, "hey, Handshake data is telling us candidates from [a certain school] want to apply." And it's been hugely successful. We've been able to hire interns from different schools we never had before.

What messaging tactics have you learned work well to engage students?

Before we go on-site, we're sending out messages to announce that we'll be there on site. We're hosting virtual info sessions to highlight, not just "hey, we have jobs" but "hey, if you're an engineer, join this info session where we’ll have an engineer talk about engineering…and by the way, we are hiring for internships, come meet us at the booth and learn more."

We’ve learned from Handshake that we have a fairly strong open rate in the market. We do a lot of subject line testing, maybe throw a French fry emoji. 🍟 We test, test, test, then learn from mistakes and talk about it as a group.

Messaging that might work for the main company website doesn’t necessarily resonate with somebody looking for a job, or an early career candidate looking for their first experience. 

How do you make career fairs more memorable for students?

You have five minutes, students are half listening to you, they just want to give you their resume and then move on to the next booth to get swag, right? You need to maximize the time. With a brand like ours, we're not a household name, so we need to work pretty hard at making that type of digital and in person experience memorable.


Even through our swag, our messaging is consistent. When we go on campus we bring this squishy French Fry box with QR codes that go to our career site. Blending digital with on site was pretty critical for us and figuring out what that healthy medium is.

Can you share what makes your internship program so special for students?

Developing strategies aligning with the business has been pretty critical for us. Our internship program is about 12 weeks. We always get a mentor who is responsible for creating the Capstone project that each intern is responsible for. [Mentors are] who are going to convert our interns into full time hires. We provide other opportunities like “learning from leaders” presentations because if we’re going to hire an intern, we want them to understand not just their job or their project, but how does their project fit into the bigger picture. 

And you've got to have fun activities for everyone too. The intern program includes tours of what we call our Willy Wonka French Fry Tour factory—interns get to taste test, see how fries are made, where our food scientists sit. We actually fly interns out to our farms to see where potatoes are grown, and provide them housing relocation assistance.



Scale your small team and win big

Lamb Weston uses hybrid engagement strategies to tell a consistent brand message throughout the candidate experience, proving that even lesser known brands with small teams can win big with early talent. 

Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.




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Your workforce is changing, fast. There’s an impending retirement boom. Filling seats takes more time and budget than you can afford. The talent shortage isn’t going anywhere, and the market is too competitive to poach mid-level talent.

If you fall behind in attracting Gen Z today, how will you stay relevant?

By using Handshake.

You may already know that Handshake can help you solve your biggest early talent recruiting challenges, but you might not know these 8 ways to save time and money by leveraging Handshake's unique platform and network.

Check out answers to these frequently asked questions; hopefully, we'll make your job easier so you can make greater impact!

1. Can I recruit new graduates into my industry?

Entry-level hiring is ramping up in a variety of industries. For example, government and construction have been increasing their entry-level technical job openings. Students with technical skills are showing a greater interest in more industries, and outside of the coastal hubs they’ve prioritized in the past.

However, if you’re recruiting for an industry that’s not digitally transforming at the same pace as others, you can use Handshake to find talent to fill any type of role! In fact, the most popular major of the Class of 2023 is Business Administration.

2. Can I source early talent, alumni, career re-starters, and more?

Don’t limit your Handshake postings to just internships. Handshake’s network includes millions of alumni who are using Handshake to find their second or third job. Given that, there are also recent grads, grad students who have work experience, learners in bootcamps and certificate programs, career re-starters, and so many more who shatter the stereotype of who you may think of when you hear “student.”

3. How does 1 platform help me fill reqs and save time?

If you’re hiring entry-level and early career talent, and you’re not using Handshake, you’re spending money and time on tools or processes where there isn’t a critical mass of early talent. To put it another way, the most efficient recruiting teams use Handshake to streamline their roles in the hiring process, reach targeted groups with messaging campaigns, and fill their internships, entry-level jobs, and other early career positions requiring 0-5 years of experience.

4. Can I post any type of req?

To attract early talent and fill your full-time entry-level pipeline, you’ll want to post on Handshake—the largest early career job search platform in the US. To illustrate, if you’re hiring for any of the following types of roles, Gen Z is on Handshake looking at you!

✔️Internships

✔️Full-time jobs

✔️Part-time jobs

✔️Fellowships

✔️Apprenticeships

5. I have limited bandwidth. How can I expand school partnerships?

90% of the top 500 4-year schools in the US use Handshake. A growing number of community colleges, bootcamps, and apprenticeship programs do, too. Because Handshake is embedded directly into each school’s career services center, it’s where students come to find jobs that they know are truly for them in an environment they trust. Top employers create school agnostic strategies and discover new pools of early talent using Handshake.

6. How can I use recruiting events to engage more diverse candidates?

To recruit diverse candidates, the ability to host or attend virtual career fairs and recruiting events at any partner school is critical. Handshake Network Trends data has found that the majority of women and students from underrepresented groups actually prefer virtual touch points during the recruitment process.

Scaling and streamlining your fairs and events virtually can help you partner with more schools—and tap into overlooked pools of diverse students. Coupled with the fact that virtual events and fairs help you save on-campus time and spend to make your revenue goals and increase your efficiency.

7. Can I send messaging campaigns year-round to engage early talent?

Raise your hand: which of the following best describes your talent acquisition strategy?

🖐 Seasonal

🖐 Just-in-time

🖐 Always-on

Think beyond summer internships. You can recruit seasonally and “always-on” to build the most engaging early talent acquisition program and diversify your candidate pool. As such, employers that see the most success with their early talent programs use Handshake to build their employer brand year-round.

Every time a new college semester starts, you get a new batch of students to message, new graduates, and more alumni—all of whom are on Handshake looking for full-time jobs. Generally, it's a best practice to engage 1st and 2nd-year students so that they become aware of your brand early in their college-to-career journey. Given that, an always-on strategy can convert students into interns and, eventually, interns into full-time hires.

8. How can I build our brand recognition with students and new graduates?

Brand awareness with early talent is a common struggle across industries. For example, are you expanding to a new geographic market? Did you re-brand? Are there innovative roles for recent grads with tech skills—but you’re not a “tech” company? To differentiate your brand and attract the right candidates, check out how you can:

🤩 enhance your Handshake Company Profile

💡become more creative with events

📈 get data on which job descriptions resonate with Gen Z, and

✍️ customize messaging campaigns to your target audiences.

Companies that recruit Gen Z on Handshake know that standing out with creative events and relationship building can help you compete for top talent. Regardless of the branding challenge you’re tackling, Handshake helps your organization directly reach students and recent grads who got their first job, or who have worked 2-3 years and are now looking for their next opportunity.

Find out what else you can do on Handshake

Handshake is the only all-in-one early talent recruiting platform. If you’re not using Handshake for your day-to-day recruiting as well as for longer-term talent acquisition in the ways described above, you might be looking in the wrong places for talent, wasting time on administrative labor, and overpaying to source through other means.

Handshake helps employers recruit early talent better. Talk to us about your pain points. We’ll show you how to resolve them, using Handshake.

8 ways to save time recruiting early talent on Handshake

Network Trends

Actionable data from our network of students, career centers, and employers.

Data-driven insights from the Handshake network

Tenure for advancement

Investing in early talent is imperative for companies planning for the future, allowing investment in retention while cutting costs in the short and long term.

A 2022 Handshake survey of 1,563 students and recent grads found that on average, Gen Z workers plan to stay at a company for three years, but they’ll more than double that tenure to an average of 6.5 years if presented with growth and advancement opportunities. This longer tenure for early talent will directly translate into additional cost savings from not needing to hire and train new employees as frequently.

The cost savings of early talent

Retention and tenure are only part of why hiring early talent is an effective business strategy—hiring early talent also offers companies a cost-advantageous opportunity to invest in the future.

Recent graduates are paid less compared to workers with more experience as they may require on-the-job training before becoming as productive. As an example, according to the Radford Global Compensation Database, the compensation (base salary, bonus and equity) averages $126,008 for an entry-level software engineer, and jumps to $236,514 for someone considered a career employee (Level 3 out of 6).

When considering current demographic shifts which will make finding talent more difficult in the future, it is clear that Gen Z talent will be critical for companies that want to ensure continued success. Companies will need their skilled talent in order to embrace digital transformation—and, this kind of early talent is cost-effective.

Early talent as cost-effective acquisition strategy

Recruiting teams, we know you feel the pressure to achieve hiring goals while being as efficient and effective as possible. When you audit your strategies, you’re likely bringing out the chopping block with a pit in your stomach. What events and initiatives should you drop? Which tools can you survive without?

But cutting off your organization’s workforce pipeline at the source for the sake of budget or time can quickly turn into missed opportunities for the entire company. It limits every leader's ability to predictably identify, engage, and attract talent—specifically, the early talent—that could make a meaningful and cost-effective impact.

So, to help you turn “What can we minimize?” into “How do we optimize?” Here are 7 tips from our most successful customers who've streamlined and scaled their early talent recruiting—without sacrificing impact.

1. Start with data

Throwing proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks will inevitably lead to irrelevant matches and unproductive conversations—wasting hours and dollars. Tailor and target your hiring efforts toward the talent and the schools that best fit your skills gaps and growth needs. This isn’t about hunches or outdated only-core school strategies. With Handshake, you can access accurate data to refine your efforts:

School Explorer makes it easy to filter different schools, identify the ones that match your hiring needs, and develop strong partnerships with those institutions.

Talent List helps you quickly filter and sort through the more than 13 million students on Handshake based on school, major, and geographic region to reach out to talent proactively.

Think about it this way: More than 70% of 2023 graduates say they have the skills they need to get the job they want, and using data to tailor your recruitment strategy means you can focus your efforts on finding them.

Learn more tips like this from Handshake Honor Roll winner Doug McMann.

2. Build an authentic employer brand

Your employer brand communicates with candidates—long before a recruiter might communicate with them directly.

While it takes some energy upfront to fine-tune your brand and showcase all of the aspects that make your organization a great place to work, it’s well worth the investment to help you connect with prospective talent, even when you can’t literally connect with them.

Companies that create a more engaging brand experience on Handshake receive 2x more page views of their Handshake Company Profiles than organizations that don’t cultivate this same experience. These companies include elements like:

Photos and videos

Employee testimonials

Student tips

Company news

Opportunities to connect with current employees

Need inspiration for your profile? Epic partnered with Handshake to boost their brand awareness. Epic now gets 4.7x the amount of employer page views and 4.8x the number of job views compared to industry peers, along with a 50% increase in qualified applicants. 

3. Develop an advocates program

You might feel like you need to do more with less—but what if you could actually get more resources without additional costs?

That’s where your own employees come in as advocates. An advocate program taps into your organization and involves them in the recruiting process. With just a little training and some helpful templates or materials, they’re ready and equipped to promote your organization, forge bonds with early talent, and position your company as a great workplace.

Early talent appreciates this opportunity to go beyond recruiters and connect with other employees or potential teammates. The CDC DSEPD saw a 20.7% engagement rate through its network of over 400 advocates. Our research found that 55% of students said meeting an employer’s teammates would influence their decision to apply. And with virtual events, you can connect your employees with students worldwide without having to fly them anywhere or asking for a big commitment.

Think of involving advocates as a way to grow your recruitment team without actually growing your recruitment team. They can help you expand your reach and make meaningful connections with early talent while saving time and money.

4. Engage in virtual events

Post-pandemic, college campuses are bustling again, and in-person career fairs are making a comeback. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to pull the plug on virtual events.

In-person career fairs demand more time, money, and resources than virtual offerings. So, when aiming to streamline and scale your recruitment efforts, don’t neglect the importance of online events to save on-campus time and spend while connecting with a broader talent pool.

And if you’re looking to support your DEI initiatives, online events are critical. Students of color, in particular, show a preference for virtual recruiting. In spring 2023, 65% of virtual fair attendees were students of color.

With virtual events, you aren’t limited by geographic location. When 71% of the Class of 2023 say they’re willing to move to a different city for the right job or opportunity, online events allow you to engage students from all over—even if you don’t have a large on-campus presence at their school.

Virtual career fairs are also the preferred format for students, and they’ve RSVP’d 3.4x more for virtual events than in-person events YTD in 2023.

So, when crafting your hybrid recruitment strategy, be selective about which on-campus events are worth time and resources and then supplement those with a broad offering of accessible, virtual opportunities that diverse early talent is hungry for.

5. Boost your event efficiency

To make the most of your recruitment events—both virtual and in-person—your team needs to be able to keep in touch before, during, and after efficiently. That’s nearly impossible if you’re juggling stacks of resumes, random notes, and jumbled spreadsheets.

Handshake Events is an end-to-end system that helps you keep track of all of the touchpoints and stages of the candidate journey. You can easily schedule, evaluate, and track your candidates pre-, during, and post your event activities. You’ll turn chaos and confusion into a streamlined workflow for all your events and fairs.

For example, CBIZ needed to boost candidate engagement while also simplifying their recruitment processes. By hosting and managing virtual events through Handshake, they saw a 3x increase in event RSVPs year over year, a 4x increase in candidates reached year over year, and a 178% increase in sourced applications—all while saving time and in-person resources.

6. Build strong relationships

“Relationship-building” and “scalable” don’t seem to belong in the same sentence. Relationships require personalization and direct contact, both time-consuming and mentally demanding.

But technology means relationships have never been more scalable—mainly when early talent thinks online relationships are just as strong as in-person ones. An impressive 67% of Handshake Network Trends Gen Z survey respondents said that it’s not necessary to meet in person to make a professional connection.

Remember that scaling your relationship-building doesn’t mean a blanket approach filled with form letters and impersonal communication. With Handshake and smart campaigns, you can efficiently personalize messages at scale to better engage early talent.

Raymond James is an excellent example of a company that uses personalized virtual campaigns to get in front of students and make them feel unique and special. Procter and Gamble also used Handshake to encourage students to apply to open positions prior to the busy fall season and, as a result, were able to extend 85% more offers before October 15th than in previous years.

So, ditch the idea that relationship-building has to be tedious. With the right technology, it transforms from sluggish and slow to streamlined and scalable.

7. Leverage the right tools

Look at the above strategies to scale your early talent recruitment while efficiently managing time and costs, and you’ll see they have one big thing in common: the right technology.

Modernizing and streamlining your recruitment processes requires tools that help you engage students without extra time and stress. Jumping between dozens of different tools, spreadsheets, and email threads is the opposite of efficient.

Handshake is an all-in-one solution to maximize your recruiting budget. With our sourcing and engagement tools, access to a vast network of qualified candidates, event management capabilities, and strategic insights, our partners see increased job applicants, event attendees, employee satisfaction, and faster hiring times.

Early talent recruitment: prioritize efficiency

Headwind or tailwind, taking your foot off the gas of your workforce pipeline is never the right move. Scaling back recruitment efforts too far means missing opportunities to connect with students and recent grads who are ready and raring to make an impact at your organization.

It’s less about what you can remove and more about what you can improve. And Handshake’s team is here to help.

Keep learning: While early talent might be new to the working world, they have the skills to make a meaningful impact from day one. Plus, they’re eager, enthusiastic, and even more cost-effective than more experienced talent on the market. Please don’t take our word for it! 

Discover why David Jordan and Chris DeLisa from TD SYNNEX say that building a pipeline of early talent has changed their hiring game with 7 tips to maximize ROI on your early talent strategy. Here’s a sneak peek:

7 tips to efficiently scale early talent recruitment