Highlights from the Student Adoption Webinar Q&A

During our recent Student Adoption Webinar, Sarah Wingrove and Kristian Martinez discussed some of the ways that they have seen clients at universities utilize social media and other tools in order to drive student use of InterviewStream Prep on college campuses. This sparked some great questions from our attendees, so we thought we would share some highlights of the Q&A session.

Using Twitter

Many attendees asked questions revolving around how to best utilize Twitter to engage students and drive adoption of InterviewStream Prep. Sarah and Kristian both agreed that Twitter is the best for reaching students because of its widespread popularity and ease of use. Additionally, unlike other social networks such as Facebook, you don’t have to worry about your content being automatically filtered out of students’ feeds.

One attendee specifically asked about the best way to find out which hashtags are popular among their students. Kristian mentioned that while different social media tools such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social may have suggested hashtags, “natively within Twitter itself you will have trending hashtags, and those usually are for the audience that you’re trying to reach.” Different tools give you the resources to know which hashtags are popular for your target audience, which will help you learn which trends will help bolster your content’s visibility.

Contests

A popular way of promoting InterviewStream to students is through contests. We host InterviewStream-wide contests for our clients such as Mock Interview Madness to help schools encourage their students to practice their interviewing skills, but InterviewStream clients can also host their own competitions to target their students.

Some universities have had great success hosting contests where students must answer a single difficult interview question, with the best response winning the prize. This helps students learn how to respond to some of the more outlandish interview questions that sometimes show up during job interviews while also promoting InterviewStream for the students to use in the future.

A great prize can make or break a competition. We have found that technology such as a tablet or other similar device is popular among students. Alternately, you could give the winner a gift card to somewhere where they can choose their own gadget.

Another popular prize is to give students an outfit that they can wear to their future interviews. This helps them to further prepare for the job search and give them a useful prize that they may not already have access to.

And if you ever need help coming up with ideas to promote student use of InterviewStream, our account representatives will be more than happy to provide ideas and brainstorm what sorts of contests and prizes will work best for your career center.

Other Methods of Outreach

For some career centers, social media may not be a possibility due to university policies or other restricting factors. Plus, not every student interacts with social networks to the same degree. For example, Sarah said that “not all students follow social media. I know I was a nontraditional college student, I graduated when I was 26, and I did not grow up with social media. So I better responded to the traditional ways.” Career centers that cater to nontraditional students or have restrictive policies on social media have to find other ways to reach out to their students to promote the use of InterviewStream.

The first step is to simply put InterviewStream in front of students at the places where they are mostly likely to see them. Depending on your school’s environment, that may mean putting the InterviewStream URL in the student portal for grades, assignments and email. For other schools, simply sending a mass email to students may be the most effective strategy (and InterviewStream Prep has built-in tools to make this easy).

Additionally, if your office is either hosting or attending an event for students such as an alumni mixer, fish camp, orientation or any other similar event, use that as an opportunity to get students interested in using InterviewStream. Students who may otherwise think that they don’t have enough time to interact with the career center may realize that a tool like InterviewStream can help them prepare for the job search at their convenience. Then, if they are interested in taking advantage of further career services, they will have already interacted with the career center.

The full webinar contains more information on this topic and will help your career center promote student adoption of InterviewStream Prep — whether you are a long-time user or if you are just beginning to look at implementing pre-recorded mock interviewing technology. Click here to read the full transcript from the Q&A, and click here to watch the recorded webinar. And if you would like to learn more about the InterviewStream Prep product, click here to register for a product tour webinar.