Academic recruitment and branding have a symbiotic relationship in the higher education space. Quality recruitment outcomes affect global branding outcomes, whilst a strong brand helps drive better recruitment. That creates some unique challenges for universities that want to take their recruitment strategies to the next level. Namely, it can be hard to know exactly where to start.

Here at The Brand Education, we bring in experts from all across the higher education industry to shed light on some of the sector’s key challenges. Today, recruitment expert James Brown shares his years of experience in solving the recruitment puzzle for higher education.

James explains that recruiters in the higher education space find themselves in a unique position, “unique because the higher education sector is built across two different dimensions: open co-operation – the search for knowledge as a global enterprise – and the drivers of global competition.”

Institutions want to be able to share their research, engage openly with each other and work together in the spirit of progress. At the same time, they need to survive. That means being better than the competition. The recruitment space, he believes, is characterised by the tension between those two dimensions.

This dichotomy is visible on every level of the higher education landscape, from the international level down to the individual one. Candidates are driven by the same tension between value-driven thinking and self-interest.

“People in academia generally have quite a high level of value-driven decision making when it comes to the role they’re in and their career. They’re committed to this idea of academic freedom and science as a global good. That’s what they’re devoting their lives to. They want to be somewhere that they feel like they’re contributing to that in a meaningful way.”

“At the same time, part of the conversation is; how good is this place, can I succeed here, can I get ahead?”

Not every recruiter in higher education has the opportunity to leverage a global brand for excellent recruiting outcomes. Fortunately, there are other means at the recruiter’s disposal.

“Value-driven thinking can take the edge off of brand thinking,” says James, “a scientist working at a lesser-ranked university can still feel like they’re contributing to their field as long as they’ve got the facilities, the funding etc. they need.”

“Academics don’t necessarily care about the university brand if they’ve got enough of the other things. The value side of things can be a leveller in terms of institutional brand.”

The value-brand dichotomy also offers a useful framework for assessing a university’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to recruitment. They map closely to the touchpoints candidates look to in order to assess employment opportunities.

On the one side, brand-thinking includes issues such as “who’s already working there, what are they doing and what are their outputs? The other part of the conversation is what is that university offering me? What level of funding are they offering? What are do they have in terms of support or research groups.”

With lots of the latter, James believes, “a researcher might feel like they can overcome a lack of the former. If there’s not much of a culture, they might think that maybe they can build it.”

At the strategic level, decision-makers need to have a good grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of their institution in order to form a realistic picture of brand penetration. Asking the tough questions is crucial to that process:

“What is our employer brand? To what extent are we able to reach a global audience for talent? Does the best researcher in China know that a job advert is coming? Do they have any aspiration to work with us?”

Data from both internal and external sources can provide the answers to these kinds of questions.

“That’s one of the things that I try to do,” says James, “use data in a more actionable way in recruitment. Rankings data and publications data is really important.”

And data can turn up some really interesting findings. For example, James frequently uses performance indicators like citations and h-index rankings to find the top-performing individuals within extremely narrow fields of research interest.

“The other side is the data around who’s seeing our brand, what interaction are we getting with our brand on different platforms. When you overlap those two you can create a really clear picture of where there’s fertile ground to try and recruit.”

But this kind of insight really can’t exist without close involvement with stakeholders and faculties. Transparency can be a key barrier to leveraging brand assets on a level that prospects can engage with.

“Often institutions don’t have visibility on the kinds of work that’s happening within their faculties. They may have 2000 academics all doing their own thing – they can’t keep track of it.”

That’s when the synergy between brand and process becomes really apparent in recruitment. Leaders should be looking to create a process whereby these two elements recognise, feed off and support one another.

Here at The Brand Education, these are the intersection of data and brand drives all of our brand consultancy services. Get in touch with the team and find out how we can help you take your global recognition to the next level.