How to Build a Digital Corporate Sponsorship Program for Your Career Center

David Kozhuk:
All right. Well, let’s kick this off. Hello everybody again. Thank you for joining us. My name is David Kozhuk. I’m the founder and CEO of uConnect, and I’m very excited for today’s conversation and especially to have two such incredible panelists here. So without further ado, let’s jump into it. Harold, Leonelle welcome.

Very excited to have you when love for you to start with a little bit of an intro, your institution, your background, a little bit about your career office, Leonelle would you like to start?

Leonelle Thompson:
Absolutely. Hi everyone. My name is Leonelle Thompson. I am Director of Career and Professional Development at Langston University. Langston University is Oklahoma’s only historically black college and university. So located in Langston, Oklahoma, it’s the Western part of the state. Campus size, residential is about 1700 students. We have two urban campuses with each about 150 students on it, and I am a team of one in my career office. So I am the director, administrative assistant, program coordinator, career counselor, all of that. So happy to be here today.

David Kozhuk:
Bless you. Thank you for that Leonelle. We’re really happy to have you. Harold, tell us about you.

Harold Bell:
Sure. Harold Bell. I am a former student of Langston University. I spent two years there freshman, sophomore year at Langston before I transferred. I am currently the director at Spelman College of career services. I have been here, this is my 21st year. Our campus is about just under 2,300 students. We’ve been having major spikes in enrollment. I have an office of seven, including myself and we report through enrollment management here on campus.

David Kozhuk:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Harold, and very excited to get into the conversation. Just as a little bit of background, as I mentioned, my name is David Kozhuk. I am the founder and CEO of uConnect, and for those of you who are new to uConnect, we’ve created the first all-in-one virtual career center, which is really designed to help colleges and universities organize and curate all of their career resources, data and information with the goal of improving visibility, accessibility, and engagement with all of the awesome work that you all do in career services. So in short, just trying to make sure that more students are using your resources earlier in their journey and making the most of all the resources, connections, opportunities that you all offer. And the topic today is really about launching a digital sponsorship program. Top of mind, for a lot of folks, for several reasons, one is, there is a real opportunity to lean in and help employer partners increase visibility, increase their brand recognition and more effectively attract early talent.

It’s very hard to get students’ attention these days, as everybody on this call, I’m sure, is well aware and that is no different for employers and recruiters. And so leaning in to help those employer partners connect with, with students is a really great opportunity. And then also to expand budget. To help career offices do all the great things that they can do to support students alums, add new resources, expand their staff, add more programming. So if budget is a challenge, launching a digital sponsorship program is a great idea to help augment the budget that you have. So that’s a little bit about what we’re talking about today and love to just jump into questions with Leonelle and Harold. So I’m going to stop sharing. Great. So just start with you Leonelle if you don’t mind, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing at Langston, as it relates to the sponsorship program, somebody asks you, “Hey, tell me about the program.” How would you respond?

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah, I would say sponsorship program is not new at Langston, but this iteration is. So previously the sponsorship program a little bit background, let me back up. My role was vacant for two years before I got here. And so the sponsorship program was through institutional advancement. That’s where the office was housed. I now report through academic affairs, but it was outrageous like $10,000 to get your name on the career fair. And I talked about the size of our university, which didn’t make sense. And so when I came in, I wanted to one, try to manage being a team of one, work on programming and then build the of employers. Langston was not known two years without a career office. How do we build up recognition, the brand, get students involved, get employers back on campus. So basically put together did a lot of research, because I’d never done that before a sponsorship package of schools that were like mine, similar HBCUs, Oklahoma schools, size to see what, what made sense as far as dollar amount.

Do I do gold, platinum, silver? Do I do a new menu of options? And what I settled on was a menu of options to be a distinguished employer partners like the granddaddy of all things or sponsoring individual things such as student employee of the month or career track. And that really helped because I knew to help scale my office. I needed to have uConnect. I needed a virtual whole career center because I couldn’t meet with all 2000 students. So having their name associated with it helps pay for the platform as well.

David Kozhuk:
Awesome. Thank you Leonelle, and Harold, somebody bumps into you on campus and asks you about your digital sponsorship program. How do you respond?

Harold Bell:
Sure. So, as Leonelle said, sponsorships are definitely no stranger to us. I actually staff with our institutional advancement, at least my counterpart there who’s over corporate relations. We meet on a weekly basis. And so it’s almost like another job, but the reason we do that, because we know that those partnerships, those strategic partnerships, all strategic partnerships lead to talent acquisition. And so we know that we must work closely together hand in hand, in terms of facilitating those partnerships. So prior to this, just speaking of the career center in general, we had two signature programs that we have that were professional development programs, and I would pretty much get those sponsored. We were able to get those sponsored for years. Each one of those each was sponsored continuously over 15 years.

And during the pandemic, we decided to just settle down a minute on that because of what everyone knows about students not really feeling at least all these virtual events, but I would always get asked, “What’s the opportunity to sponsor?” And so we don’t have sponsors necessarily sponsoring buildings, brick and mortar, and that thing. That was something that occurred before I came, but we don’t do as much of that. But one of the challenges we have, is an overabundance of employers and technically graduate schools as well that come to Spelman. And it is what I describe as a high-volume, intense, highly competitive recruiting environment. And so employers are constantly trying to figure out, well, how do I position myself in all of that? Because the world is at your beck and call, and I’m trying to figure out how do I stand above the crowd.

And so when we were looking at the virtual career center, my thought was, well, here’s an opportunity outside of brick and mortar to digitally represent yourselves in a space. That’s not with all the crowd. And so we intentionally did not have a lot of sponsors because the whole point was there’s already a lot of folks coming to Spelman. Let me see if I make this safe, reserve space for these sponsors and give them an opportunity to reside in a space that was going to have high traffic by design in terms of the vision that we have for the center so that’s a little bit about how we got there.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah, totally. And you mentioned moving away from brick-and-mortar. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges with the brick-and-mortar approach or the physical in-person approach to sponsorships and then coupled with that, the benefits of doing it in a digital or virtual environment?

Harold Bell:
Sure. Like I said, we only had two signature programs prior to the virtual career center and that had a limited amount of students in it. And so the bandwidth in terms of exposure and how many students, you would be exposed too was limited to how many students were enrolled in either one of those respective programs. So that was a very finite view of finite access if you will, of students, if you just sponsor one of those programs. And so with the virtual career center, again, we were saying, well, this is something that we were going to begin directing, not only all students to, but because it’s really a community for those of you who are familiar with the site. So we’re not only just talking about students now because there’s faculty, communities, alumni, community perspective students, current students, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The ecosystem that we talk about in career services that we know is critical to make career services really make outcomes successful in general. Now you’ve built that ecosystem through technology digitally on the site. And so now you’re not just even engaging students, you’ve now increased your exposure level, tenfold by availing yourself now to a whole potential ecosystem.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah.

Leonelle Thompson:
I love that too, just to tag on that was one thing that never existed. So to get a prospective student, for example, Saturday, we did a university parent to university. Parents of prospective students and they show the site so the parents would know, hey, your student’s going to come in. And they have all these resources. And today we’re doing, senior day high school day and the site’s being profile. So it’s a further reach than a brick and mortar, a name on a conference room.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah. And while we’re at it, I’m actually going to pull up the site. So you can talk a little bit about the site and show off some of the employer sponsors that you have, but while we’re doing that Leonelle, tell me a little bit about your goals. You came to Langston recently and launching a sponsorship program and was a major and early priority for you. Tell me a little bit about your goals in launching the program and leaning into that as early as you did.

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah. My goals centered around student success because there was a void, getting students caught up centered around scaling my office and then making Langston well known and partnering with organizations and companies to start this pipeline. We didn’t have that before. And so I couldn’t do it by myself, boots on the ground. So when I started at Langston, it was November 2020, no one was here. And so how was I going to reach people? It wasn’t going to be going to meet with them, I did in a prior role at their offices. We’re also in rural Oklahoma. So the next biggest city’s 45 minutes away. How can I reach them in a way everyone, as Harold talked about the community, how can I reach them, just a better way? And that was digital. So, but I also the buy-in you have to have someone’s got to put up the investment because otherwise we’d be in the same cycle. So finding, targeting those employers that covered all of our schools, most of our majors. So there was something for every one.

So my goals were definitely student success, which is key in tying that to institutional goals, scaling the office, because we know that students need a resume review at midnight. I’m not here to do that. And then also getting the recognition out of that Langston and the employers making that connection.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah, it’s fantastic. And tell us a little bit about, I’m going to go to your sponsorships page here. You have 10 sponsors. Tell us a little bit about the sponsorship program and let’s dive into one of the particular sponsors in general.

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah. So the sponsorship program, again, they got a menu of options. So one of the things when COVID started to lift in the summer of ’21, I hosted an onsite and virtual employer summit that was introducing Langston to the world, so to speak. And it was there that I made the ask for the sponsorships, we’re doing this digital program because I’m a team of one, this is a great way to build your brand with employers. And so had many employers like Harold said, we were just swimming and employers to get for people to come, but this was their time to put their money where their mouth was. And so I did the ask, distinguished employer partner gets a career track, time on campus. They plan their own programming, but the employer summit was the big way to ask.

And also I was able to work with them on unique aspects. So not only did they sponsor the platform, but also unique ways. So Paycom for example, is headquartered in Oklahoma city, 45 minutes from us. And they also sponsored our clothes closet. So one of the things in addition to just sponsoring this, their name is on our closet. So students come and get professional attire, free of charge sponsored by Paycom. And so that’s just an example of how it grew from, they have a page, they were actually here, they had their day on campus yesterday. And that’s part of the… In this distinguished employer partner is everyone knew Paycom was here. It was all over social media. And for me to be able to do that for 10, as opposed to 50 who ask is a lot better for my resources and time.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah, absolutely. I love the employer summit. And I want to talk more about that just as quickly, Harold, I’m showing your virtual career center. Can you talk a little bit about how you use the virtual career center and then we can dive into to how you win your sponsors.

Harold Bell:
Yeah. And I just want to… David, just really quickly, because as we’re talking about this, I saw a question real quick that said, “What did you mean by digital sponsorships?” I think we better clarify that.

David Kozhuk:
Let’s do it.

Harold Bell:
So by digital sponsorship, we’re meaning that we’re referring to the uConnect sites as digital a digital platform. And so how do we actually get sponsorship for employers to sponsor these digital platforms? So that’s what we mean by digital sponsorship. So I saw that in and I’m like, “Well, that’s what we’re talking about.” So we want to clarify that. So now jumping in-

David Kozhuk:
And also Harold I’ll just mention, she mentioned is it similar to the career services management system, just as a little bit more background on the virtual career center platform. What it’s designed to do is actually integrate the content and data and information that lives across all your different systems. So we bring in actually internship and job postings from tools like simplicity and Handshake, alumni mentor profiles from tools like people grow and graduate, labor market data from tools like Emsi and many, many more. So it’s not a replacement for any of the tools or resources that you have. It is designed to integrate everything and radically simplify virtual engagement for students, for alums as Harold and Leonelle now mentioned even prospective students and parents, employers, community really showcase all the work that you’re doing. So that’s just a little bit of context is how it fits in with some of your other tools and resources that you may have. So thank you for that question, but Harold, go ahead.

Harold Bell:
Yeah. So really quickly, when I first saw the uConnect platform, it was really a matter of timing. I had an employer come to me, as Leonelle said, “We’ve been flooded.” And someone said, “We have some money and we really want to give something to Spelman.” And they started asking me for ideas and that was Carrier. And Carrier, I started talking to, I had worked with that recruiter for over 15 years when they were at a previous organization. And I started explaining to them what this vision was, what this platform, what my vision was for the platform. And they loved it. And actually, I must say it, I’m proud to say that yes, they ended up being the premier sponsor to get us started, but they also ended up giving us a larger gift than the virtual career center, but it was actually the virtual career center that facilitated the entire gift and it was a half a million dollar gift. And so that was pretty good. And they pretty impressed [inaudible 00:19:52] not all to the virtual career center clarity.

So my thought after that was, we talked to David at his team, they had all these different features right now you’re seeing a variation of a first-destination survey that’s been fed into the site. This is one of the products that you can purchase in addition to the basic platform. And so of course, all of us are talking about student success, first-destination outcomes, what have you. And this was an opportunity that’s visually striking to actually put that information and make it available to whoever wants to look at things, whether by cohort grad school employers, or by major, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But to be clear, this was an add-on. And so I said, “Well, okay, how do I begin thinking about how do I get these additional things and really build the system out to make it robust and make it attractive?”

Because as we know, platforms such as Handshake they do so much, but this is much more than just our particular platform that drives our recruiting function. This is really a much more broader concept of what we do. And so to make a long story short, I began to offer sponsorships to actually do add ons, such as the first-destination component you just saw. And other types of integrations, APIs such as Vault, such as Candid Career, we’re looking at getting ready to do something with LinkedIn Learning. We have LinkedIn Learning, nobody’s doing anything with it. And every once in awhile somebody and say, “Well, what about LinkedIn Learning?” Well what about it? So David and his team have found a way to actually connect LinkedIn learning. And so again, we start building sponsors and… People are always asking us, what can I sponsor?

So just for context, our campus does not have a formal corporate partners program. It is all customized. We sit down with everyone and we talk about their goals and objectives. And of course, again, as I said earlier, we all know that within that is talent acquisition. And so in the talent acquisition portion of that conversation, that’s where I would bring up uConnect. So Carrier, this is a page that you’re looking at and David’s been scrolling through it. This is something that the sponsor would get their own dedicated page. They’re able to put their social media on the page videos. One of the things I like is that there’s two buttons, you’ll see view our open positions and careers at Carrier. View our open positions actually publishes the jobs. If they have them posted in Handshake, it posts them directly to the site.

And remember what I said earlier, you’re trying to get out of the traffic. There’s a lot of traffic and I don’t know how many of you know about Atlanta traffic, Atlanta traffic is bad, but Spelman recruiting traffic puts Atlanta traffic to shame. And so it’s an opportunity to stand out there. And then the other button actually takes you to careers at Carrier, it takes you to the job portal on Carrier site. And so there is a lot of flexibility around what can be done on the pages. And so of course, as you can see, this is a higher level form of branding that the corporation is getting, that they probably can’t even get on your website, but this is built for it.

David Kozhuk:
And tell us a little bit about the career community model that you’re using to curate content from all these different systems. And then if you could tell us about the partnership with Wells Fargo and how that came to be as well, that would be great.

Harold Bell:
Oh, sure. So, so we have these different career communities. And so we have things like financial services that you see on the screen right now. And so that’s a huge cohort of companies that come to Spelman financial service is probably the most robust when it comes to campus. But you see the others that David has positioned on the screen. And what we’re trying to do is give students an opportunity to focus for those of you who work in a traditional liberal arts education environment. You know, that everything is very broad. And we spent a lot of time trying to reel them in and trying to help them get focused. But I do want to make clear, they don’t have to live in one career community. We don’t restrict them to that because that’s the beauty of liberal arts is the diversity of it.

And so students can live in different community, but what happens is the jobs you’re seeing. So we’re able to configure, for instance, for financial services, we’re able to configure the jobs and Handshake that are finance related to publish to the particular career community. You’re actually seeing a lot of stuff there right now, but when you saw the jobs, [crosstalk] the jobs, yeah that’s all coming out of… We use Handshakes, that’s all coming out of Handshake, but again, and when you talk about to an employer, okay, you’re trying to distinguish your jobs from the ocean. Well, here’s a place to have your own private lake and it can side in this career community and those jobs can be published there. You also saw the vault guides. So the ones related to financial services, we’re sending those out there. You’re seeing candid career. You’re seeing a whole bunch of stuff out there.

And one of the things I like that we do that we thought about, and many of us, obviously in the profession know this, is that professional organizations are great networking tools and students look past them all the time, unless they have student chapters usually on campus or something, but there’s always a student initiative with any professional organization because as that’s part of their longevity in keeping the organization going. And so we’re trying to also educate students on with this particular career community, what are the professional organizations that you can join. Because as we know, that’s another layer of networking, another layer of conferences, another layer of mentors, another layer of jobs, scholarships.

Leonelle Thompson:
Scholarships, I was going to say scholarships, yeah.

Harold Bell:
On and on and on. And they don’t even realize until you… And of course the bigger the city is, the more likely some of these will have chapters actually in those cities that students can potentially, if they’re meeting in-person, we have to put that little caveat on there. These days, if they’re meeting in-person can actually attend the meeting so or remote.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah, that’s incredible. Thank you for sharing that Harold. There’s a couple questions in the chat from Julie. If we’re going to share some information about the sponsorship tiers and documentation, we’re going to be doing that after the webinar, over email with the recording. So there will be documentation sent out. And then there were a couple questions about what Leonelle and Harold are using to build this site. And this is built on uConnect, and we’re going to actually launch a poll quickly for those of you who want to learn more about uConnect, you can just raise your hand in response to the poll here, but we’re going to spend the rest of the time, just talking tactically and strategically about how Harold and Leonelle have gone about building this great sponsorship program, engaging employers and some real tactical advice.

Whether you have uConnect or not, we’re going to dive into some of the more tactical advice in just a moment. But if you would like to learn more about the platform that Harold and Leonelle have implemented to showcase their work and engage their employer sponsors just respond to the poll and we’ll keep it up for about 30 more seconds. And then we’ll keep moving.

Harold Bell:
David, I do want to say, because they’re asking about materials and a lot of things that we did were regard really in conversations, but this is something that I did. That’s probably even better than a brochure, is we actually did a virtual tour with uConnect of the site. So what you’re seeing now, we did a virtual tour and we recorded it. And what I did is I sent it to all my employers and more or less said, “Hey, if you think you might be interested in sponsorship follow-up.” Because I like to customize those conversations. So I don’t have brochures per se, but I know people are visual and we’re actually selling it as we’re talking about it and they’re actually seeing it. And so, and they can go back and watch it, watch it, watch as much as they want. So the person is asking that and I’m totally okay sharing the video as well, but that’s how we promoted. Not necessarily here’s the brochure and here are the tiers.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah, absolutely. And if you don’t mind, we’d love to send the video along with some of the other materials and the links to the site, but let’s get back into the conversation and help folks on the call again, whether they use uConnect or not get some best practices about how to launch and manage a digital sponsorship program. So Leonelle as mentioned new to Langston, there’s a lot of folks on the webinar today that probably don’t have an employer sponsor program and are thinking about how to get started. Can you talk a little bit about some of the first steps that you took and a little bit about your pitch internally, who’d you talk to, and then any advice that you might have for folks who are at that very early stage?

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah. My first step was to see what had been done and find out internally, like a lot of our offices, we are self-generating. So the budget for my office was my salary and benefits and that’s it. And so there was no operational, no budget bacon for two years. So look back at previous years, saw that the sponsorship package was a bit outrageous just based on the size. We were also in COVID. So how was I going to make this more virtual? We didn’t know when we were coming out of COVID. So that’s when I really started thinking about the sponsorship package, looking at other schools, I came from an institution that did not have one, a private institution. We’re a public state school, looked at the state schools here in Oklahoma. They have 20, 40,000 students. So not comparable, but Oklahoma. Looked at other HBCUs and then approached my institutional advancement group, asked if they wanted to be involved. They said, “No.” I said, “Okay.”

So at that point I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to do this.” So I put together a packet starting at the $5,000 level. And I said, if I can get 10, if I can get 10 at $5,000, that’s great for me for a year and set it each year. I just want it on a yearly annual basis, started with other aspects. So there was, “Well, what if they didn’t want to do 5,000?” Everybody’s in COVID. So what are other things they can sponsor? Basically, you don’t really get to come to campus for free. So you can sponsor a workshop for $750. All the things I took from my previous role, where we were just giving stuff out for free. I knew there was a high demand riding the HBCU wave. I’m like, this is the time to strike.

And then I thought about other programming I wanted and I wanted it to be specific for my office. Not for the university, love Langston, raise your money. I wanted it to be specific from my office. So professional headshot day. So getting a quality photographer for that, our students here are first-generation and they come to my office sometimes just to talk. I wanted snacks. I wanted to have coffee every morning. So there’s a career coffee center in my office where that someone sponsored for food. And so it grew out of the platform needed, but it also grew into, “Okay, not everyone can do it, the $5,000 level.” That get your name on the wall and on the platform, but what are other areas? And so workshops, career tracks to offices, which I needed money to pay for buses. So let’s do that.

And so people took advantage of that, but you do 5,000, you get all of that. And so it’s worked really well again, yearly. I kept it simple. So know your gold, your bronze. I didn’t want to do any of that. That got real confusing real quick, because I’m not big enough. And I limited to 10 because I know at 10, at the $5,000 level, that’s 10 days on Langston’s campus. I can manage that. I couldn’t manage 50 employers wanting to have a day on campus. I can tell target different students with the 10 sponsors. Well then what happened was it was for example, MedPro said, “Okay, we’ll do it, but now we want to do an immersion program, a foundation of insurance program.” So they actually come to campus. They have a cohort of students who are learning all about insurance, who will now they’re paying to Indiana and April for a full immersion trip.

So there’s different ways that within the sponsorship that we even customize various things, I mentioned Paycom and the closed closet and it’s been wonderful because they’re names out there and there’s little perks too, like you’re in the student newspaper, using the students for social media, if you paid the money, students will last, you all day long. So again, getting back to it was able to pay for the platform, because again, we probably all have horrible websites. You could not find my office on the Langston website. So, but now you can, it’s funny, I get calls because if you Google Langston, this site comes up. So it was a great way to transition away from Langston’s website, still links. So still looks like it’s links and site. It’s just better, but also get that brand recognition out for our employers and the students, you hear them saying, “Oh, Hormel, you’re in Minnesota, but we know about you.”

David Kozhuk:
Yeah. I love it. I love your entrepreneurial spirit that you just came into the office and took such a first principal’s approach to thinking about the sponsorship program and as an office of one offloaded, a lot of programming and a lot of the great services that you might provide with the bigger stuff and got paid for it.

Leonelle Thompson:
Yes, I [crosstalk].

David Kozhuk:
There’s lots of hats off to Leonelle on the chat. And so I’ll just echo that.

Leonelle Thompson:
I send the parking permit, but their day on campus, they have to design that. Yeah.

David Kozhuk:
I just want to ask while we’re on the topic, if somebody has not started moving in this direction, one piece of advice in terms of how to approach what you’re doing with a sponsorship program, one piece of advice for the group.

Leonelle Thompson:
Align the sponsorship program with institutional goals and objectives, that gets by in from all those people with VP and their title and above align it to student success, retention, persistence.

David Kozhuk:
Say more, how did you position it that way?

Leonelle Thompson):
I positioned it with, we have a relatively low retention rate. And I said with sponsorships, with uConnect, with more opportunities, our freshmen will be engaged quicker because they can see what happens after four years. There’s a pathway for them. That’s not just academic. They can see internships, they can see people are interested in them and get those opportunities. The networking, we know that first-generation students sometimes struggle with building networks. This is going to help build those networks early on and that got the institution involved. That’ll help them stay semester to semester, year to year.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. Harold, I want to turn to you for a moment. There’s a question about any pushback from your advancement offices or other folks on campus fighting over sponsors. Have you had any friction in with regard to the sponsorship program that you’ve launched? Obviously you’re generating lots of interests and funds any friction from other offices and how have you dealt with that?

Harold Bell:
No friction from other offices. Again, part of what helps mitigate that is, well, first of all, institutional advancement and I have great working relationship. And when I was first brought on to Spelman 20 plus years ago, they told me upfront, we need for your office to be in a better situation because there are some campuses we know that those two offices can be adversarial to one another. So we squashed that a long time ago. Now there’s been different people. I’ve probably survived all of them, nonetheless, so having that weekly meeting, at least on that side, that’s fine. What’s interesting with the faculty now again, because we have so many companies coming, they’re really not trying to complain about anything because it’s almost like I’m going to have to give blood If I start trying to latch on to somebody and convince, and they’re like, “Hey, you can handle that, we’re fine.” And so in our environment, because we have so much activity, it’s hard to process all that.

In fact, I tell the employers a lot of times that if we actually entertain you all, just for the sake of entertaining, we’d never teach curriculum, because you all be doing information sessions, ad nauseum and we’d lose our accreditation. So that’s not going to help.

David Kozhuk:
Certainly not. So obviously love the comment about having a good working relationship, having a strong collaboration with those other offices as a foundation. So then coming to them on the heels of many other collaborations that you’ve done, it’s not out of the blue, any advice for folks on the call that may not have so strong relationships with other departments about how to go out there and build trust and build those collaborations?

Harold Bell:
Well I always say in general, just taking it away from the site, just talking about career services in general, we’ve got to be collaborative collaborators all the time. And sometimes we may have to volunteer to do this. It may seem like it has nothing to do with career services, but you’re building relationship equity. And so it may mean getting on a committee that has nothing to do with anything.

Leonelle Thompson:
Yes.

Harold Bell:
You’re judging something that has nothing to do with what you’re doing. But it does have something to do what you’re doing. You’re building relationship equity. And so when it’s people will remember, “Oh, that person was a great collaborator with us.” And so we really should be spending a good bit of our time doing a lot of that because that helps build that community. And of course when people like you, they listen to you so well sometimes, but it certainly helps. And so building those relationships are really important.

Leonelle Thompson:
And I agree like my office used to be in advancement before the two-year hiatus. So it took some getting used to we’re now in academic affairs. But building that relationship, it was rocky at first because it was getting people to understand at the university level, you may be dealing with the VP of an organization. I’m dealing with university relations at a corporation and they have different budget. And I come from a corporate where I come from a university relations world. So there’s different ways that giving is done. There’s different ways gifts are given. And that wasn’t always clear here at Langston. And so now it’s a great working relationship of I’m like Harold, even in my short time, I’ve outlasted everyone in institutional advancement. So I don’t know what that says, but we used to meet weekly now there’s no one in that role.

David Kozhuk:
It was going to things like our president scholarship gala. I had a table. So just being on those committees, like Harold said, judging something that had to do with some goats. I didn’t know what that was, but I got out there and did it. So building the relationships among campus, but I will say there’s sometimes there’s a rub between career services and institutional advancement. One of the ways I didn’t talk about how the money came in, I ran it through Langston’s foundation that 501c3 people organizations could give to that. And it never got convoluted with the greater Langston. We all know money ends up missing in the normal account structure. But that was a great way to also help institutional advancement as well. Their investment accounts went up with that money sitting there.

Yeah. And just like basic partnership principles. You have a lot that the advancement office doesn’t have and they have things that you don’t have. And so together you’re one plus one equals three sort of thing. And thinking about having a lot of empathy for your partners across campus, understanding what their goals are, understanding what your goals are, what you bring to the table and vice versa can really help create a mutually beneficial partnership. I think the other thing that we talk with a lot of our partners about is breaking down the silos in your head and just thinking about the student experience as the north star. As the ultimate goal. So it’s not my goals versus your goals or the way it works in my office versus your office. Like what is best for the student, what is best for the institution and how can we collaborate to do that? And so in terms of reaching out and sparking some of those partnerships, building empathy for those colleagues across campus and keeping the student in mind versus the division or office or department that you’re in.

And so there’s a couple great questions in the chat. I want to move a little bit towards the conversation around engaging employers. Leonelle you talked a little bit about your employer summit. Harold, talk to me a little bit about how you… I know that they’re coming to you. There’s a question specifically around what is your advice to schools who do not have employers knocking down their doors, wanting to sponsor.

Harold Bell:
Thanks for giving me that one David.

David Kozhuk:
So close your eyes for a second and picture yourself in a different environment where there aren’t employers coming to you, what advice do you have for folks who are in that position looking to reach out to employers and get their attention?

Harold Bell:
Right. That’s a toughie… I will admit that’s tough one. I’m going to go back, I guess first to, I guess going to seem like I’m getting a little off subject, but I’m not, I got to go back to what Leonelle was talking about with, you got to get aligned with the institution in terms of their institutional goals and their strategic goals. Because I think when you’re dealing with, when you don’t have those employers knocking on your door and even if you do, I mean, I think this is true either way you go, employers they have to understand, we got to get out of this conversation to be superficial terminology partnership. When they’re only really talking about, I want to recruit. I mean, to really strategically align, I think we have to really strategically align.

And so that means being able to communicate. And so for those that maybe don’t have everyone knocking at the door. It’s important as Leonelle was saying, I think she might have had to do this even a little bit more than I did is just making sure that this is known that this is a part of the strategic movement of the campus, strategic plan of the campus. So even when the president is out talking, the president ought to know about the virtual career center. I did a whole presentation to our senior team. All know what it is, and I’ve got people there they’re having their teams on the senior team, their direct reports. You all need to watch this video that Harold did. And I want you all to know about this virtual career center. So I say all that to say, if you’re going to pull it off, if you have those limited resource-limited interactions, that means the messaging of this has to be socialized greater.

That means, I think the people that are decision-makers, they have to know that this is part of the strategy and it has to be part of their conversation. You don’t have to own it by yourself because presidents are fundraisers themselves. I mean, the good ones are. So they’re out for fundraising. They need to know what this is and what you’re trying to accomplish and how it fits in the overall strategic goals. So I would say the strategic part of it definitely becomes paramount that it becomes part of those conversations.

David Kozhuk:
And again, thinking about what are you uniquely, even if you don’t have all the answers and all the relationships, what do you as a career office uniquely bring to the table that could be valuable for those employer partners, maybe the relationship comes from the president or advancement or faculty members, but you bring something unique to the table, recognize what that is. And then go establish partnerships with folks across campus and make a joint effort. It’s better to have half the pie than, than not at all. So, so that’s awesome.

And I’ll pose the same question to you Leonelle nobody in your seat for two years. Probably not a lot of recruiting and conversations happening before you got there. So for all intents and purposes sounded like you started from scratch. How did you think about what employers to reach out to in what order? I mean, it sounds like it was rooted in the employer summit, but how did you even get people to come to the employer summit? And how did you decide to segment the list and prioritize folks?

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah, so I started with our largest majors and so we’re an agricultural school and we had a lot of USDA. We know government, they don’t really give money. So it was like, what are other industries that our ag students could go to or other employers? So I started with them. Our school of business is not our biggest school, but they were also the easiest because I come from a corporate world, they have the money. So we started reaching out to banks, accounting firms. We didn’t have any accounting firms here and working relationships that way. LinkedIn was actually pretty good to use when I did the summit, all my marketing came from LinkedIn. I would post it and then people started sharing it. And then I had the tagline, Oklahoma’s only HBCU come learn more.

And I listed out the agenda, which was, this is Langston. That was one that was one of our sessions, was, this is Langston. Here is Langston in your back door. We ended up having, I did a virtual and in-person summit simultaneously, we had people from California, New Jersey employers who wanted to reach out because the other thing I did was I looked at where our come from, we’re the Western-most HBCU. We get a lot of students from the west coast. We started hitting the west coast companies who are headquartered out there. And so I didn’t limit the summit to anyone say, “Oh, no, you can’t come.” It was open for everyone. And to either join in-person or virtual, and they had to pay, because again, I’m all about self-generating.

So they had to pay to come to the summit. And it was very nominal, 25 virtual, 50 in-person, because we had paid… We fed them well, brisket some barbecue, it was July. It was great. But they had to pay. And so, and one of the things I told them, I said, you may think it’s not necessary to pay, but we are self-generating. That’s why you didn’t see cuts and career fair costs during COVID career offices still had to operate. And once I had those conversations with employers, because they were is pushback. Why is the career fair price the same? Why are we paying for the summit? Because this goes to student success, we still have to operate. And I understand your operating budget may have been cut. Your recruiting budget may have been cut.

So maybe virtual is a better option than in-person, but gone are the days where you get to come for free because I am self-generating. And that was the thing. When organizations were coming to campus for free, we weren’t seeing that return. It’s like anybody could just show up and it was like one, I needed more professionalism around that more structure and you add a cost. And so you come at lunch, you pay for the lunch, come at dinner, you pay for the dinner, but you don’t get to come anymore just for free on campus.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah.

Harold Bell:
Yeah. I’d like to add to that because I think that’s a great point. So sometimes in these institutional advancement conversations not so much here, they’ve gotten better, but they forget about career services. Again, going back to my statement, all investment leads towards talent acquisition. Everybody’s getting money here, there and everywhere. And then when it’s all said and done and done and said they’re knocking down the career center door, we gave all this money and we want X students and cetera, et cetera, etc. We’re looking like you gave all this money. Where is it? So I love Leonelle when you said no, we didn’t go down on the career fair. No, because you all fit well, sometimes the employers forget about us.

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah.

Harold Bell):
And remember the hand that feeds you.

Leonelle Thompson:
Yes.

Harold Bell:
Even if the school don’t bring up the career center, you bring up the career center.

David Kozhuk:
Yes, absolutely. And I just want to go back to one thing that Leonelle said, which could get overlooked to LinkedIn. That’s where everybody is. I think a lot of career service professionals are on LinkedIn for their own purposes to help students navigate LinkedIn, but to be able to search for employers in Oklahoma and the university recruiting folks and either send them a message or for them to see your posts, it’s a really savvy way to approach it.

Harold Bell:
And David just really quick. So I don’t do a summit, but I do a virtual town hall meeting at the beginning of every semester, something I started in COVID. And so I just invite… We have very robust career fairs. So I just invite everybody that I take the career fair list. And I invite everybody to my virtual info session that I do at the beginning of the semester that talks about recruiting and everything. And we make the virtual career center. I make sure that they know that they don’t get a whole full-blown presentation, but they’re invited to see it in another presentation, but I raised their awareness. So again, I bring the audience in. So again, if you don’t have the money maybe don’t have a summit.

My opening meeting that I have every semester is I convene the meeting, come to my party if you want to know how to recruit at Spelman. So everybody virtually is invited to the party, come one, come all, bring friends. I will share with you a piece of that, about the virtual career center and about sponsorship. So that’s the way I do it.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah. There’s a couple of really good questions in the chat. I want to ask quickly, because we talked about this briefly before in terms of making the case. If employers are like, I don’t necessarily want to pay or what’s the ROI, Harold in previous conversation mentioned some interesting thoughts about ROI and about helping make the case for employers. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Harold Bell:
Sure. So ROI to me is return on investment. What is investment? Investment in the context of talent acquisition and in an institution is visibility. You looking for visibility beyond just the common recruiting tactics, you’re looking for a higher level of engagement and so higher level of engagement with faculty, higher level of engagement with students, obviously. And then with both of those, what you’re looking for, is that you hope that those two things will positively influence the probability of your recruiting yield being higher than what it was when there was no investment. And so I think we got to get away from this concept of pay to play, nobody’s playing, I’m not playing. I don’t think you are.

This is serious business. And so you are trying to position yourself is what you’re doing. And so the investment translates into visibility, higher level of engagement and increased probability of increased placement yield. That’s what you’re investing in simply coming to somebody’s campus. Well, that’s a recruiting budget. You have to have… If you’re a recruiter, you have to have a travel budget. You have to have all of that. So I call that the cost to do business. So that’s not necessarily investment. You have to do that. You can’t recruit without that. That’s part of your operating expense. So don’t put the guilt on the career center about an operating expense, no, investment.

David Kozhuk
Yes. I love that. And we could probably talk for another hour.

Harold Bell:
[crosstalk].

David Kozhuk:
Coming up against the hour. Leonelle I want to finish with you. Same question in terms of helping pitch employers, what’s the angle. Any advice for those on the call?

Leonelle Thompson:
Yeah. It’s positioning yourself. Just like Harold said, positioning yourself and it’s long term. So you’re not going to come in one year and say, oh I got this many students. We started from scratch. So it’s long-term investment. It is being here. And that’s what I love about the program I established is the employers, yes they sponsor. But then they eat have a little bit of a different spin. So one did, student employee of the month to help student success. And so it’s that long term. You’re getting that investment. You are investing. It’s not just come career fair, cool. Gone. It’s not post and pray. It is, you are coming. You’re investing and [crosstalk] Handshake is full of posting and prayers. Yes. So, but it’s investing to get the return that you need.

David Kozhuk:
Yeah. You two are so special. Thank you so much for your time. You’re an inspiration to the field. The chat speaks for itself. Hats off to both of you for doing such incredible work. Thank you everybody for joining us this afternoon, taking time out of your day. And we look forward to continuing the conversation.

Harold Bell:
Yes. Thank you for the opportunity.

Leonelle Thompson:
Thank you all so much. This was great.