Recruiting exceptional student talent is a challenge for any company, and it is even more of a problem if you are doing it on a global scale.
Perhaps one of the most successful employers at campus recruiting is Google. Google utilises an interesting mix of tools techniques and long-term engagement strategies to build relationships with student talent as well as contributing to their development.
For this week’s episode, I’m delighted to welcome not one but two guests from Google to give us an insight into their approach. Suhail AH is Talent and Outreach Programs Lead at Google India and Valley Mein who is Student Development Lead for Google in the APAC region.
In the interview we discuss:
• The challenges Google face in campus hiring
• How to engage students in a meaningful way
• Creating developmental programs for students
• Building long-term talent relationships
• Ensuring fair and unbiased opportunity
• “Connect With Google”
Suhail and Valley also share their thoughts on how employers can get started on building outreach and engagement programs with student talent
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:18]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 154 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Recruiting exceptional student talent is a challenge for any company, particularly when you’re doing it on a global scale. One of the most successful employers at campus recruiting is Google. Google utilise an interesting mix of tools, techniques and long term engagement strategies to build relationships with student talent as well as significantly contributing to their development. For this week’s episode, I’m delighted to have not one but but two guests from Google to give an insight into their approach. Sahael Ah is talent and outreach programs lead at Google India and Valimine is Student Development lead for Google in the APAC region. Enjoy the interview. Hi guys and welcome to the podcast. Could you just introduce yourselves and tell everyone a bit about what you do?
Suhail AH [00:02:17]:
Sure. Hi everyone, my name is Suhail and I’ve been with Google for a little over three and a half years now. Based out of the India office and I was leading our entire campus outreach efforts in India for the first three years but now I currently lead some of our scale student developmental programs and assessments along with a few scholarships across Asia Pacific.
Valley Mein [00:02:41]:
Hi everyone. Super excited to be here. My name is Valley and I’ve been at Google for around eight years now. I started in Mountain View in California and am now based in Sydney, Australia. The majority of my time at Google has been spent focused on intern hiring in both North America and Asia Pacific and more recently I’ve moved into student development and long term student engagement.
Matt Alder [00:03:06]:
Perfect. Thank you. And student hiring is what we’re going to be talking about today. So for many years Google has been a real sort of popular employee of choice among students. Are there any challenges that you face in the campus hiring space?
Suhail AH [00:03:22]:
Yeah, I think we certainly see our own Share of challenges as well. I think one that definitely jumps up is the scale at which we want to be operating. At Google, we believe that there is great talent to be found everywhere and not just in the top campuses. But it’s very difficult to be physically present and visit all of these campuses and students. Thus we need to find, I think, more scaled yet meaningful ways in which we could engage with every student who wants to connect with us. This is where I think we’ve made a lot of improvements over the past few years. We got a lot from students from countries where we’re also not physically present as a Google office, let’s say. So examples like from Bangladesh or Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand. So I think it’s through these scale efforts that we are also now seeing a few hires coming from these regions. So it’s really exciting for us. Another challenge that comes to mind is also a few perceptions. We’ve actually found that there are students who don’t apply to Google thinking that they would never get through the hiring process. So you could say that we are on this mission to encourage all interested students to apply to us by making Google more accessible. So this is something as well that we’re constantly trying to solve. For Bari, any thoughts that you want to add there?
Valley Mein [00:04:45]:
Yes. So one of the challenges we have seen has been technical development of students. So as Sahel mentioned, at Google we believe that great talent is everywhere, not just at the top universities. We also see the need for students to develop further outside of their university curriculum in order to be both industry and Google ready. Because of this, we have diversified our developmental opportunities to extend beyond, for example, internships, which are both expensive and resource intensive. We now offer a variety of lightweight developmental programs which are low cost, virtual and scalable, which mean that they are accessible to more students, not just a select few. Another challenge has been building and maintaining long term relationships. So in the past, relationships with students have been very interactional and ad hoc, with Google really only reaching out during times of peak hiring when we had open roles to fill. This was generally in the final year or so of a student’s degree. So by increasing the number of opportunities that students have to interact with us earlier in their degree and making the way that students engage with us more accessible. It encourages students to have multiple interactions with Google over a long period of time. We are intentionally connecting earlier and building these long term relationships with students. This is where our strategy has evolved the most in recent years.
Matt Alder [00:06:22]:
Fantastic stuff. So you’re saying that your sort of strategy’s evolved quite A lot in recent years. How has it really sort of evolved over the last couple of years?
Suhail AH [00:06:34]:
Yeah, I would say that we’ve been evolving our campus hiring strategy in many ways. We are now more focused on engaging with students from year one on birth of the undergrad program and engaging with them throughout the year. We’re also a lot more focused now on student development and giving them a longer Runway to grow by getting the right kind of resources into the hands of every student. We also want to make sure that we’re trying to reach as many campuses as possible. So we’re scaling to reach many campuses. But in a nutshell, I think we’re really striving to give every single student a a fair and unbiased opportunity to get to Google. What are your thoughts on that?
Valley Mein [00:07:12]:
Valley we have spent a lot of time over the last couple of years developing engagement plans that are tailored to each region with a couple of goals in mind. So firstly, to incorporate varied methods of scaled outreach, so think YouTube live. Secondly, to gather more data points beyond just academic results. And lastly to introduce tools and mechanisms to help students navigate their way to Google, such as online scaled assessments. Through building relationships over a long period of time we gather multiple data points. We learn more information about the students interests and abilities such as their extracurricular activities, projects that they’ve been working on, open source contributions and coding, competition performance. We’ve brought all of this together through a project I’ve been working on for the last couple of years called Connect with Google. Connect with Google is our long term engagement strategy where we meet students hopefully in their first or second year of studies and intentionally maintain that relationship with monthly touch points and development throughout the duration of their studies and even post graduation. We want students to understand that even if they aren’t currently a fit for Google, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t a potential fit for Google long term. We really want to invest in students, help them to develop and to build a two way relationship.
Matt Alder [00:08:40]:
I think that sounds really, really interesting and that sounds like such a great initiative. Can you tell us more about the Connect with Google framework and how it works?
Valley Mein [00:08:52]:
Absolutely. So Connect with Google is a comprehensive engagement strategy which incorporates both high touch and low touch methods of engagement. So high touch methods of engagement include more in person events either on site at Google or on campus, such as internships or traditional in person developmental courses. Low touch methods of engagement are scalable and virtual outreach such as YouTube live events and online coding challenges. Our goal is to bring all engagement together to create a Connect with Google Community where we have avenues for two way communication and opportunities for members to learn from each other. Through Connect with Google, we map out multiple pathways to Google and track each student’s journey. We do this by pulling together all of our offerings into a streamlined engagement plan, making it easier for students to navigate all of our programs and ensuring that they don’t miss anything. We try and share the right opportunities in the right location at the right time. I have been asked many times why is Connect with Google needed for us? It allows us to identify potential talent two years ahead of graduation. It also provides multiple data points over a long period of time and this gives us the ability to predict potential fit for Google prior to the interview process.
Matt Alder [00:10:19]:
So it looks like tools and technology play a big a big role in what you do. Can you tell us other ways in which Google uses tools and technology to stay connected with students?
Suhail AH [00:10:30]:
Yeah, certainly I can share a few examples on that because I think this is a space we’ve made some significant progress over the last few years. We now actually have multiple scale developmental programs and assessment efforts running and these are servicing different technical skills and requirements for students. These experiences in our we’ve seen that they’ve actually proven to give really useful as insights for students during technical interviews, etc. So just to give you a few examples of this, we have one online coding platform called Kickstart where students get to solve puzzles and coding problems which have been created by Google engineers. This platform mainly focuses on data structures and algorithms and we’ve seen great number of interns and new grad hires for us have been coming from this platform from all parts of the world in fact and many of them have come from campuses that we even haven’t hired from before in the past. So really technology is enabling a lot of that. We’ve got the Global Code Jam competition which has really been very popular over the years. There’s another program called Google’s Summer of Code where students get to team up and work with faculties on their campus on open source projects. There are many other such programs like hashcode Code you get ahead so you can look up all these programs online. They’ve also been building out a lot of elearning resources. So we’ve got a platform online called the Tech Dev Guide which is hosted on our student career site, so which actually tailors a lot of content for different levels of experiences, including niche pathways for areas like say cloud or for machine learning. And these are sources both for students and faculty alike. We’ve also been running A lot of developmental sessions and code labs on YouTube live. And that’s another way we’ve been leveraging technology and certainly like even Barry mentioned, for connect with Google, using social media as platforms to stay connected with students. This is another way of an example that I could share.
Matt Alder [00:12:36]:
So final question. Is this something that only a large company like Google could implement? I mean, what would you suggest other companies might be able to do as well?
Valley Mein [00:12:47]:
Sure. So I believe that anyone can do this. You don’t need a sophisticated CRM tool to start implementing a long term engagement strategy. There are simple steps that anybody could implement to get you on your way and then build from there. So the first step that I would suggest would be to map out all of your engagement touch points throughout the calendar year just in a simple spreadsheet. It doesn’t need to be anything new. You are already doing this. So for example, these touch points could be the dates that you are out on campus, when internship or scholarship opportunities are available, or when university graduate postings go live. You can then start to add layers by thinking about what articles or developmental content might be relevant to students and when might be the best time to share this information. You could then have another tab tracking student participation in all of those offerings with the goal of identifying high aged students and demonstrate indicators of top talent. You would then aim to implement a process to integrate this with your applicant tracking system. It’s important that you do get buy in and support from cross functional teams including the business recruiters and hiring managers. You will need volunteers from the business to run the opportunities on the engagement plan and all partners need to see the benefit of investing in long term engagement. Any additional thoughts on this, Suhail?
Suhail AH [00:14:12]:
Yeah, I think that you’ve actually covered most of the key points there. I think a lot of organizations are already doing great work here. But I think from my point of view, if you want to be doing this for every single student out there, I think you’ll have to keep in mind a few things. I think one definitely would be the objective. Why are you doing this? Because if you’re only going to be doing this from a hiring outcome point of view and only from a funneling pipeline point of view, you will end up having to maximize for the return on investment and narrowing down this funnel. So your objective has to be about wanting to give every student an equal opportunity to connect with your organization and giving them a great experience and staying connected with them while giving them avenues to grow because they could be your immediate or long term hiring prospect. But if not that they will certainly be a great brand ambassador of yours. The second thing I would say is like scale. I think we’ve mentioned this a few times already. A lot of companies you’re already doing great work out there on and off campus. Look at ways in which you could just simply scale a lot of what you’re doing, even if it simply means to video record what is already being done and putting it online for more and more students to consume. And last but not the least, I think you have to effectively use your existing tracking mechanisms in place. The approach should be to track all these engagements that you have with your students and these touch points or multiple years to sort of like help build a story about that student that no resume can actually give you. So yeah, I would say these are the factors that really come into mind. I think most importantly is to is to get things started. It takes time and dedication, but you’ll soon start, I think, seeing benefits and the results from this.
Matt Alder [00:15:57]:
Suhail and Valley, thank you very much for talking to me. My thanks to Valley and Suhail. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future, your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
