Data-driven insights

Winning over early talent requires early and consistent investment throughout the campus to career journey. Learn tips and best practices from Handshake’s network of students, career centers, and employers. Key findings include:

A hybrid event strategy is still important in 2025

You can improve your fair and event ROI with follow-up

Strong early ID programs tailor experiences to nurture top talent

And more

2025 Campus to career report

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Understand which industries you're competing with

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Employers

Tips and trends for modern recruiting

Find the talent you’re looking for

A few weeks ago, Team Handshake attended the 3rd annual URx Conference in San Francisco. We’re fortunate enough to be a URx partner and were excited to come back to the big URx conference after a series of regional meetups throughout the US in Anaheim, Dallas, New York and Chicago before the conference.

It’s great to see this community of early talent and university recruiting professionals pick up so much momentum over the last couple years. Handshake is determined to continue these conversations and elevate you—our employer partners—as much as we can.

An experiential approach to early talent recruiting

On Day 1 of URx, Handshake CEO and co-founder Garrett Lord sat down with Corey Twitty, Talent Acquisition Manager of University Recruiting, to discuss the merits of bringing experiential elements into campus recruiting. Their fireside chat covered a wide variety of topics, from the efficacy of experiential recruiting, to diversity & inclusion, to optimizing your recruiting organization to hire faster.

To kick off the conversation, the two discussed the importance of combining your on-campus strategy with a digital approach. Corey explained his methodology of bringing these two distinct tactics together by starting with the data. He found that there was a lack of ROI coming from certain types of events and saw more quality hires from other channels.

However, that doesn’t mean the campus event is dead—it’s all about how you set it up and approach it. According to Corey, you not only need to make memorable experiences, but you should also consider building meaningful relationships with students before showing up to campus.

When it comes to early talent recruiting tactics—both on campus and online—Corey has seen it all. He’s spent the last ten years finding and hiring top talent that is just starting out in their careers. To resonate with this particular audience, he swears by experiential recruiting events, which focus on holding workshops for early talent at different campuses and seeing how they think.

Making a case for early talent hiring

As we all know, these on-campus events and digital strategies come at a cost. Half the battle is getting adequate funding to back these high-ROI initiatives. When Garrett asked Corey about getting buy-in on his projects, Corey replied with a pragmatic, clear response:

Corey mentioned that he ensures his business partners are looped in at every stage of the process. He thought back to a time when his data-driven approach brought some great results when he recounted:

He mentioned that within a week of that moment, they had already brought four people on site to interview.

Leveling the playing field for all early talent

When Garrett asked Corey about his approach to diversity & inclusion, Corey firmly stated:

Corey mentioned a time where his employer had a goal to balance gender and have a much more representative workforce. He remembered his team worrying about meeting the expectations around those initiatives as they built out a 3-year plan. By taking a more proactive approach to their early talent strategy with digital solutions like Handshake Premium, Corey mentioned that his team was able to nearly hit their goal in just one year.

Continue the conversation

That was just one of the many compelling talks during the URx 2019 Conference. There were discussions about employer brand, building talent pipelines through (winter) internships, and leveraging analytics to scale. If you want to hear some of the chatter, check out the hashtag #URx19 on Twitter and LinkedIn!

For any questions on Corey and Garrett’s talk or Handshake Premium, just email employers@joinhandshake.com.

Data-driven insights

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Find your next engineer on Handshake

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Maximizing early talent investment and ROI: C-suite alignment guide

Watch: Gen Z hiring trends for 2025

URx 2019: Building meaningful connections with early talent

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