Staying Agile through Student Insights: How KPMG Tailored its Recruiting Strategy
To successfully navigate the new normal in University Recruiting, UR teams need to know exactly what students’ priorities are — and how they evolve. KPMG partnered with Veris Insights to develop a blended recruiting model training guided by students’ event preferences and used custom UR360 student insights to tailor its recruiting strategies to its key business lines and gain stakeholder buy-in.
Developed a data-driven hybrid recruiting strategy
Used custom insights to tailor recruiting strategies
Gained stakeholder buy-in to maintain long-term agility
Developed a Data-Driven Hybrid Recruiting Strategy
Upon returning to campus post-pandemic, KPMG’s University Recruiting Team realized that they needed to adapt their strategy to account for the shift in student priorities. KPMG’s team worked with their Veris Insights Strategy Lead to learn the most impactful methods for engaging students in person and virtually, and together, developed a blended recruiting model. Veris Insights helped KPMG implement the model with a training module that recruiters used to determine the optimal balance of in-person and virtual events.
of students prefer networking sessions in person, largely favoring in-person formats for events focused on building connections.
By comparison, almost 60% of students prefer panels and info sessions to be held online.
Used Custom Insights to Tailor Recruiting Strategies
In addition to the University Recruiting Council, KPMG leveraged its UR360 Brand membership to gain custom insights into students’ perceptions of its employer brand and reputation. These insights are filterable by students’ role interests, location, gender, and more. KPMG used its custom student insights to tailor its strategies according to the needs of different business lines, like audit, tax, and advisory, ensuring it would appeal to the segments of students interested in each core service.
I really wanted our teams that have direct relationships with the business to learn the tool [UR360 Dashboard], so that they could infer any information that they needed to adjust their
specific strategy.
While much of what we do is cross-functional and broad-based, we have a lot of businesses at KPMG and they have different needs, and sometimes they need to differentiate their brand from the firm’s.
Gained Stakeholder Buy-In to Maintain Long-Term Agility
The Veris Insights Team presented KPMG’s custom student insights to internal stakeholders from KPMG’s different business lines. Together, they also led a presentation to more than 150 KPMG recruiters on the new recruiting model and how to put it into practice on campus. That, along with access to the UR360 data, was key to gaining stakeholder buy-in about the need to adjust recruiting strategies to shifting student priorities.
Stakeholders hold the key to UR agility: Better & faster decisions require partnership with business customers.
…the benefit of that [UR360 Presentations] was being able to show the tool to other leaders on our team that had direct contact with our business stakeholders, so that they could utilize the information to appeal to their stakeholders and substantiate our strategies.
– Malana White | Senior Director, University Talent Acquisition, KPMG
