Crafting Employer Engagement Strategies that Align with Your Institution’s Mission

Meredith Metsker:

Thank you, everyone, for joining us for this live session with the amazing Gerald Tang from Bridgewater State University. As we go through, if you have thoughts, feel free to put them in the chat. If you have questions, there is a Q&A feature as well. You should be able to see a little thumbnail for it at the bottom of the screen. So you can put questions in there as well, but I will also monitor the chat for any questions. I believe there are some interactive elements to Gerald’s presentation, right, Gerald?

Gerald Tang:

Yup, sounds good.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So as we hit those, you can respond in the chat and we’ll go from there. So, Gerald, I will go ahead and turn it over to you.

Gerald Tang:

Thank you, Meredith, and hello everybody. So good to see folks joining the call and excited about this topic. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen to make sure that we are good to go. Looks like the screen should be good to go. I do have a small deck to help guide us for today’s conversation and I’m excited to share this topic with you as I was embarking on these questions throughout this past year. So excited to be here and hello. For those of you who did not have a chance to meet, my name is Gerald Tang. I’m currently serving as the executive director of Career Services and Internship office here at Bridgewater State University. And I will jump right in because it will give you some context about my organizations and institution and so forth in just a second.

A bit about me, I had really interesting background in variety of institution. I think that’s important context for today’s conversations as I have exposed myself into different kinds of settings, particularly working with employer from a small Catholic institutions to a selective institution to a large and public, private and so forth and so on. So have a little bit of experience. I wouldn’t call myself an expert in any way, shape or form. This is probably experience coming from experience and from my own perspective. I am a product of a public education system from both my undergrad and my master’s degree are in public institutions and my doctorate degree is a private regional institution as well.

And some of you may wonder why there’s an asterisk at the bottom of some of the institution. Those are places that I’ve done internship in, whether or not during my undergrad year or my graduate school time as well. So I put them in those brackets. With that in mind, love to share a little bit about what we’re hoping to talk about today. I’m hoping, by today’s sessions, many of you will be able to identify one way to enhance your own employee engagement strategy and outreach. I’m hoping that you are able to learn one way to define engagement tier.

Perhaps, that’s a model you want to use or create your own models based on what we have experienced this particular year as we work on refining our own employee engagement efforts here at Bridgewater State University. I use the word BSU interchangeably. So if you hear the word BSU, I’m referring to Bridgewater State University for this context. And I’m hoping that, by the end of today, you’re able to notify at least two data source to inform and refine your employer engagement plans. So let’s jump right in. Like Meredith said, I would love for us to have this as a conversation. So at some point, we’ll be asking you all to type in the chat with some of your thoughts and questions as well.

So a bit about Bridgewater State University, we are one of the Massachusetts State College and University Systems. We are different than the UMass System. For those of you who are maybe familiar with the UMass System, we are a separate system than the UMass System, but we have many colleges also located within our system with the state colleges and university, that including our community college system as well. We found it in 1840, so we are currently celebrating 185 years here at BSU. We have about 9,000 and change students. We are aiming to go back to about 10,000 student populations. That’s one of our institutional goal.

And like I mentioned, we have a variety of sector. We ran it from our teacher’s college route. It was founded as a teacher’s college, but we’re currently expanding into variety types of colleges and offering. We have over a hundred plus majors and minors and we have many different school within colleges within the University systems here at BSU. And we are located in Southeast Massachusetts. For folks who may not be familiar geographically, we are the center point between Boston, Providence and Cape Cod. So if you’re putting those triangle together, we saw in the middle point in between all those three area as well.

One of the unique things about BSU is that many of our students, consistently for the last 10 years, our data source has suggested that over 90% of our students graduated from BSU remained in Massachusetts or the New England region. So that’s an important reference point as we guide our conversation for today. 68% of our students are commuters with 32% of our students are residents staying on campus during their time at BSU. We are a centralized career services operations here at Bridgewater State. We recently merged between two offices, historically in the past was separated from career services and internship program office. They’re two separate entity within the University.

I was being brought on to work to merge two practices together back into one centralized operations with the renewal commitments under the umbrella of BSU Works, which is a larger university initiative to prepare the University and students to be career ready and the Career Everywhere mindset. Currently, we have 11 full-time staff member, three part-time staff member, primary focus on advising and also working with our operation area for part-time staff, one grad assistants and nine student staff. Those primarily focus on marketing effort that support our marketing elements for all the student staff here.

As far as our employee relations team is concerned, we have a couple people who are wearing multiple hats, including myself. We have assistant director, associate directors of employee engagement and outreach. Their primary role is to work with employer strategies, supporting our employee engagement program and activities. They also do see students. We are all hands on deck approach because of the size of our institutions and then our student need. We do have an associate directors of data and operations. That persons really support the employer relations teams with data information, Handshake system management, and obviously, data utilization as well.

We also have our associate directors of internship and career development that basically is our advising arm of the office because the persons overlap with internship, that persons also support some of the elements pertaining to the internship hiring and data tracking from the employer perspective as well. So today’s session is about crafting our employee engagement strategy from our vantage point of the landscape. I want to be clear, we are not here to tell you, you’re going to craft the entire strategy by the end of today’s sessions. We are really helping you to prompt. I’m just sharing my experiences as we go on a journey to really understanding some of these key questions, allow for us to have a chance to think about that.

If someone asks you, “What are some of your top employers?” I wonder how would you answer their questions? Prompt, this is the time that you want to type in the chat. If let’s say a parent asks you that questions, how would you define that, “Who are some of your top employers?” I’m glad to see that some of you are really assessing and refining your top employers’ approaches, which is excellent. And I’m happy to share my journey here at BSU about how we did that and what the lessons learned as we go through today’s presentations, but keep putting on your chat information.

When I come on board, I recently joined BSU about a little bit less than two years now. And the first questions as I’m learning about the operations here and trying to merge two offices together and the first question that prompted me is, “How do we define our strategy?” and we were to share, who are our top employer, what are the key metrics. One thing I discover is that many of our colleagues provide different answer. Some of them may say, “Well, I have a list of employer that I can pick up the phone and ask,” which is a great approach. However, that is more individualized rather than if I ask another person’s, that list might not be the same or may not be consistent with what the previous person have shared.

So as I continue to navigate this journey, I noticed that this is really lofty in general and hard to define. So I’m starting to work with the team on how we can truly refine that, so there’s not just an individual approaches and what I believe are the top employer versus my colleague beliefs are, “How can we craft something that might be more institutionalized or more of the collective focus?” So that prompted something I start. I actually started by looking around to see what other colleagues are actually doing. So I put in a survey out to many colleagues in my region and ask similar questions, “What example offering do you use to engagement employer?”

Because if folks asking top employers based upon interactions, then I want to see, “Okay, career fair could be one example of it. What else do they do?” And many of them respond back with, well, they have a lot of site visit, employer spotlight, panel events, networking, employee residents. Some of them might be guest speaking at their programs and activities, staff training. That’s helpful to see, [inaudible 00:10:36]. One thing I notice here is a lot of them center around event, a lot of event focus, which is fine, but I keep prompting in my head the question, “So does the event equivalent to relationships?”

And that’s the question that really start to simmer in my head on, “How do we understand that is interactions equivalent to key employer, top employers?” And that’s something that I continue to learn about as I’m reading through some of these benchmark. And I posed an additional questions, “How do you develop an employer engagement models at your institutions?” I got to see some of them have tier approaches in looking at employer. Some of them look at it once a while alongside with their own strategic planning process or their yearlong planning process. Some of them based on outcomes data that would just align with what many of you have been sharing in the chat about.

And others, surprisingly, doesn’t have a response to that. These are just a couple of them that came through, and oftentimes, they’re like, “Well, we really don’t have one,” or, “Well, this is not a priority,” which is an interesting observation that I do notice, especially in a crowded area in the northeast with so many institutions around the area working to recruit great students’ talents coming from a similar region. In fact, the question is, “What makes us unique? What makes your model unique? What makes your institution unique?” So I continue to explore those two questions as we go through the journey of refining on our end.

I also further ask the questions of, “What are some of the indicators for success, but how to define that is working or not working?” One thing that coming from a quick anecdote here, many of them also go back to events attendance and traffics, interviews and higher end outcomes. So I always say to colleagues then is, “Does …” Again reaffirming the questions of event attendance equals relationship. I keep using a dating approach, “Does going on number of dates equals marriage proposal?” I wonder that question sometimes, right? “Does it mean if I’m going on a date with an individual for 20 times, that means this person’s definitely going to be a marriage proposal coming along?”

Some may say, “No, because I don’t know the person’s need and I don’t know the person’s values and priorities and do I know myself what is working or what is not working? How do I define where we now get to the point of the relationship being fruitful and meaningful?” So I’m starting to really work with my team here to understand that process on knowing, “How can we get an insight with our employer base to understand their need and at the same time understanding our need to find a mutually beneficial way to refine our model and our approach?”

And questions also, as I’m talking to my colleagues about, “What makes our school different?” We have many other states, institutions within our regions. I’m not talking about the UMass System. I’ll talk about the private institutions within our area. Many of them are sharing similar things. “We are great for students to come here to learn. We are here to support our local workforce.” Some of them might say that, “We are here to train leaders of the world,” yet the question is, “Is that similar when I’m going through one website to the others?” and uniquely, as you’ve seen from previous benchmark that many of them are saying similar things.

So again, it’s similar in my head that questions are, “What makes our institution different and how my strategy support the missions of the institution?” And remember I mentioned earlier, I have the opportunity and privilege to work in variety of schools and settings, and oftentimes, I always go back to, “Does my work connect back to the value of the institution? If so, how from employee engagement perspective? How might I connect the dots?” An example that I always draw from is, if I’m working in a school that have students coming from all parts of the country or the world, my strategy in my mind should be, “How can I be able to connect in a wider net from students who might be interested in working across the world?”

And if our focus is training future leaders, how might we now work with our employee partners to focus and center back to that particular mission?” And I don’t know and I’m still remain unclear with that questions, whether or not many of our colleagues in this space are actually thinking from that vantage point versus looking at, “Who are the top employer? Who are the largest employer? Who might be the employer from the Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 company list?” But questions are always also thinking about is, “How might you employ this new strategy to support the changes in your institution? As we know that currently, there’s many challenges experience that we all experience in higher educations and even in the private sectors and the employment sectors, how do we now start changing our strategy to really support that? If so, how do we continue to refine and how often do we refine some of these as well?”

So these are the questions they continue to service as I was working with my colleagues here to refine our employer engagement approaches and an area to think about. Questions so far is, “How do we do that?” So the first thing we then do is starting to looking at our SWOT analysis in approaching our employee engagement strategy. Looking back at the institution at the University here at BSU, what are our strengths? So as I mentioned earlier in the profile of the University, we are a public institution. It has a particular story. 90% of our students came from Massachusetts and graduated and retained in Massachusetts.

So evidently, we have a strong alumni support network in the region and that is one of the strengths of our institution. We have been here for over 185 years. That’s fantastic. That means there are some reputations of alumni staying or remaining in the region if that’s the case. Means likelihood that I may be able to come across a alumni from the institution will likely be surrounding in this area. We have an institutional initiative that focus on career readiness and think about Career Everywhere approach under the umbrella of BSU Works. That is initiative that coming from president’s office, that’s our strength, which means that it might create an opening and opportunity for us to start to reimagine many aspect of our work, including the work happening in my office, and in particularly in this conversation, the work with employer.

So it’s not a surprise for me to jump across different colleagues and say, “Hey, how do you work with your employer base? How do you partner with alumni in spaces?” When I’m using the framework of BSU Work, it create more of a connection point rather than a questions of that I’m trying to push the door open. Now, there are certainly challenges as many institutions might experience that as well. In my end, we come across many silos. From an especially employee engagement strategy from this perspective, many academic departments might work with their own alumni basis, maybe a students of there, a former students come back to the institutions offering a lecture, offering a program.

Maybe they’re mentioning that they have an opportunity and then faculty members share within their class. So these silos of scenario continue to happen within our institutions. And one of the other challenges is that we historically and continue to be rooted in the teacher’s college philosophy, yet many of other outsiders are not aware that or may not be as familiar, as you say, with some of the new offering happening at the universities. For example, we recently opened up a cybersecurity program. A cyber range is available if in our institution. That is something that not a lot of people are aware of and we are now trying to think about ways to push out informations related to the new offering that might be aligned with some of the critical needs happening in this region.

We do not have a corporate relations, corporate engagement persons within the University. At least as of today, I don’t know that. I don’t know we have, which also opened up an interesting dialogue that I had recently with our alumni and investment teams about how they approach corporate giving and corporate engagement perspective and that is any ever continuous conversations that we are learning and navigating with each other on what that might look like. And I mentioned earlier, we are in Southeastern Massachusetts. Within 30 minutes of drive, you can hit at least four institutions within my area.

If you expand the reach with 50 to 100 miles within my campus radius, you hit hundreds of institutions within Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, and so forth, and even Connecticut that you can probably reach with many, many institutions are looking at basically the same populations and basically the same types of students and employer as well. So that could be a weakness from our end if our reputations of the institution are not continuing to be renewed or in people’s mind or employer’s mind. Now, that’s a question that we need to work through. Wasn’t the opportunity we noticed. We recently have a new university-level strategic plan that has been in place since December of last year.

So we now have more institutional buy-ins. We have an opportunity for new leaderships. We also have institutional investment that fall under the BSU Work Initiative in thinking about ways to elevate our university for future workforce. One of the unique things about BSU is that we are an equity-minded institution from the University level. So it is something that we continue to look at. How can we ensure that all of our students have access to opportunity regardless where their upbringing come from, regardless their backgrounds and so forth. It’s our commitment as a university level to think about our work from an equity lens as well.

We actually have a racial justice equity task force that is university-wide that focus on working with all departments in thinking about ways to make our work towards more equitable outcomes. Some of the threats, as you can imagine, and during this interesting time, I would say, obviously, the economic impact of uncertainty, what’s happening from the federal government to the local, to the regions, how that might impact the different changes in our employee engagement strategies and how we can connect with our employer to understand the everchanging needs can be a difficult part of our formula.

We are also looking at financial constraints. Obviously, we don’t know what might come down the pipe regarding our resources infrastructure pieces. We’re financially healthy at the moment, but that can change overnight. So one of the things that as we think about employee engagement strategy is, “How can we ensure that we have the adequate support to ensure the executions of our employee engagement strategy is working and is supporting the needs for all constituents group?” As you may recall, we have about close to 10,000 students, who have 11 full-time staff member that work with all parts of the career services operation.

So you can imagine that, any given time, all of us are working in different projects, different initiative, focus on different priorities. That is something that is a challenge for us as a state institution and it’s something that we recognize and we have to be proactive thinking about ways to address that as we’re designing our employee engagement model. So as we go back to that, I encourage you all to think about, at some point looking back at your institutional strategy or your departmental strategy, as ourself, “How can I apply the SWOT models in looking at your current employee engagement model?”

And also keep going back to ask the question that I posed earlier as well, “How is the strategy different than a school next door or similar type of institutions? How does your strategy support the missions, if any?” to make your institution unique and your unique offering to be interesting and stand out, how your employee strategy to support the changes happening in your institution. These remain the three questions that we continue to refine even as of today to keep going back at our employer engagement model and thinking about ways to enhance and improve our approach as well.

So what we then do is creating a multitier definitions of our relationship. We start by thinking about these five area. The first thing is looking at who are our prospective employers and not to saying that perspective from a very general term. We divine more specifically employer that are not currently engaging with the University in any way. And the second tier is employer who only engage with job postings with no insight into hiring campus engagement or any involvements. That will be the second tiers. The third tiers are the partners tiers where employer are engaging in a few career events, hiring students throughout the year, but participate in other types of work that is also happening within the institutions.

And one of the things that we start to throw in the questions within the team is, “How can we now engage partners that align with our efforts that happening here that are equity minded and how do we assess that? How do we engage that?” That remains a question that we continue to refine within our tier model as well. We’re then looking at the tier four model of, “Who are our true partners? Who are those individuals who truly engage with us in many way, not just in events and program, but really supporting our academic endeavors, maybe serving an advisory board across institutions, maybe part of our efforts to connect students, not just for the first hire, but truly retain alumni within their organizations and their operations and also proactively sharing what their needs are alongside with what our plan for our future growth within the University?”

And we also added the last tiers of relationship that no longer valuable for our university. That is a sticky part of it. Part of it is many people say, “Well, we don’t want to just say no to an employer,” and my question is, “Why not?” if an employee consistently asking for a particular need and request and we continue not addressing and be able to meet that request. An example will be, if a healthcare system within my region consistently only want to engage with us and we’re offering, let’s say, nursing opportunity and our university currently do not have nursing program and there’s no plan of going into creating a nursing program, why do we want to keep holding on that relationship?

So that is a question that it’s a little bit tricky to navigate, especially when we’re going externally to our outside of departments, talking to colleagues about, but it’s a helpful conversation starter to ask them why we want to keep those relationship as part of our model and really asking questions to unpack their reasoning was super helpful from our end. So some of the lessons learned when we initially created this model, one, it helped us to organize ourself internally on who our relationship and what made that look like. One of the challenges, it becomes a massive spreadsheet of basically, imagine we are Handshakes for thousands and thousands of employer post opportunity, our outcome data, our insight all throw into this spreadsheet. So it becomes a very gigantic spreadsheet of any sort, which is great, but also it’s hard to navigate.

And it get into dialogue of whether or not, “Are we looking at the industry or looking at those employee who are hiring through the job category?” That is questions that we starting to service. “Does one employee in the office sectors, the relationship that we have with them is equivalent to the employer in the government sectors that have relationship with us, but are different approaches?” And that is a question that has signed to service up more as we went on to continue on this journey to understand our approach. And like I mentioned earlier, no different than any others, many other discovery center around events. Well, they come to a fair. They join our networking event. They supported our market interview program, “They help with this particular workshop, that particular workshop.”

Again, it goes back to the questions that, “Does event engagement truly equal to meaningful relationship?” My short answer is no, but it is more. It needs to be more within that formula as we look through the journey and defining that relationship. So just give you a sense, this is what it looks like. I’ll just give you a snapshot. Obviously, I can’t fit an entire spreadsheet onto the screen, but it was super helpful to seeing how that might manifest initially as we go through that. So just give you a snapshot here. So then “We’re realizing, well, the spreadsheet is not helpful, so what do we do?”

The questions then become, because we’re only using certain data points, we need to open up our data sets a lot more intentionally by bringing in meaningful data to help inform our process. So what we end up doing is look at multisource of data to start to refine our practice, our model. So some of them including Handshake data, like I mentioned earlier, we are a Handshake school, so we obviously look at job posting as a factor, but looking at multiyear job posting, so not just one-off job posting that we have to engage what the pattern looks like. Then we have access to our internship for credit data that is in the University level.

So each department may have internship for credit program. They will report that data up to the registrar office. We now have access to those 10 years’ data and we now utilize the data to see who are the people actually hiring them and how does that connect with or not connect with our Handshake posting data as well. We also look at our BSU alumni data on LinkedIn. That was super helpful for us as we think about, “Well, with so many alumni staying in the region, we got to need to see who are the employer who are actually retaining these alumni, and if so, for how long do they retain those alumni in the regions?”

So that was helpful to pull those datasets into the model, into the mix. We then start to also look at our first destination survey data. I’m sure many colleagues here are using that data as well, “What are the outcomes of our students and where do they go?” One thing we also add into is our enrollment trend data. We sign to [inaudible 00:30:37] office to say, “Hey, where are you recruiting students from now and what are the region that we should start looking at more closely to create possibility and pipeline for future employment options for employer that might be willing to or interest in having students who are coming back in that particular region?” So that data set has now been entered into our model.

And we’re also looking at our curriculums, “What are the new programs that’s coming down the pipe? What are our colleagues talking about regarding new programs or new degree offerings happening at the University?” We’re starting to look at what might they be and what are unique offering that they’re hoping that programs aim at to help inform who are the prospect employee, in particular, that we now added onto the lined up. Obviously, working closely with President’s Office. We do have an individual in the president’s cabinet that work with government relations role.

So that person has been super helpful to see where maybe the institutions are moving and direction they’re going and help to shape who are the prospect or who are the key relationship we want to move from tier two to tier three or tier three to tier four. We also added insight from the board of trustees folks and many of the advisory board that we slowly discovered individual program might have advisory board members serving in those capacity and we start to look at how are those company or organizations are supporting outside of serving in the advisory board.

One thing I love, not a shameless plug, but it is a shameless plug for uConnect is we have the model for the labor market data within our uConnect website. So why not using what we have already available and starting put the Lightcast data under the uConnect module for those insight and data point to see what are the trends happening in our regions, especially we are state institution with the regional focus. That is available data for us to consider to look at as well. As long as the local market data, what’s going on in the Southeast Massachusetts, what’s going on with the Boston City area, which is the capital of Massachusetts and what might be information that we can now blend into the work happening in our space.

Many individuals may be serving in our local chambers, “What are the regional chambers and who are the members of those active chambers?” Those are also helpful places for us to start to bring in into our formula as well. And most important, I would say one of the key aspect that we’re signing to do is asking for more feedback from our students. So we employ the Universum data. It’s a survey that we work with external partner, Universum, to help us to collect some of those student feedback. We also house a few town hall just to have students share with us a little bit of insight of what kinds of employer type, what type of programs, what kinds of employer they want to see coming to campus or engaging with the work happening here at the University, which lend itself very nicely with the faculty and staff input of their “secret draw”, “Who are the relationship that happening in their secret draw that we can now help them to make the relationship even more meaningful and more helpful?”

And lastly, but obviously not least, the institutional strategy and priorities remains important part of it, “How can we now align the employee engagement strategy to the larger university plan and effort? If our work continue to center around equity-minded practices, how can we now think about our employer engagement strategy with the-equity minded lens as we engage our different employers?” So that is also an important factors that we now utilize. So what is it? We discovered that a massive spreadsheet is not helpful. So in recent time, we moved that into an industry-specific employer engagement audit.

We found that a specific regional audit or industry-specific audit was more helpful rather than trying to blend different industry together into one spreadsheet that it’s hard to find and hard to understand. We now focus on very subset of sectors. We completed one with the healthcare sectors. We’re looking at the healthcare employee within the region and using the previous data source I mentioned earlier to blend into those tier model to help us to understand, to unpack the relationship that we have with that. As I mentioned earlier, we are a state institutions with a regional focus that support the local workforce.

With many students alumni coming from the regions, we start to think about, “How can we make it easy to start to target who are the prospect and the key relationship that might be supporting this particular commitment?” which we end up rolling out a campaign called Hire Locally with the way that in which we center a public message that we want to work with local employer in this particular region. This was particularly helpful when we’re trying to address questions across and say, “How come this one Fortune 500 company are not recruiting at BSU?”

We now have a more concrete reason to explain to our colleagues and say, “Although we really value those relationship with large employer, the question is, ‘Does these large employer have regional offices within our area that our students are excited about and our alumni will find it valuable?’” And if the question is no, that’s the questions that will become our secondary tier rather than our key employer initiative within our space. We’re starting to think about a better formula in adding what might be engagement more than just a event focus to design our partnership.

By the way, I was a math minor, so you can probably see a lot of math formula come through on my presentation. So we started to define, “Maybe we should include events plus outcome and what might be some of the ways in which they integrate their learning, their needs to our resource and support with the career integrations and maybe they serve for an advisory capacity for providing us two-way feedback, so that we understand their evolving needs. At the same time, they also understand our unique students’ populations.” And obviously, the length of our relationship is that a new relationship versus it has been with us for 10 years and they truly understand what we do and our unique offering, that equals partnership.

This is a better formula from my vantage point in working with our team to say, “How can we start to move employer from one tiers to the others?” Organically, we end up forming our own informal versions of a employee engagement council. This is something that we are in the work as we speak to start to open up for colleagues across and say, “Hey, how can we bring people together to start to understand our approach and also expand the way in which we can learn more about their input, their insight in their employer base that we may not be familiar with?”

So we now have more coordinated effort when we are reaching out to employer, not just reaching out on my office behalf versus on the other office we have, but we’re reaching out on behalf of an entire university. And as a result of that, we started to develop a strategy in creating a more structured process. When we connect with employer, we starting to ask more concrete questions, not just, “Who are you trying to hire? What opportunity that you have?” Beyond that, we are asking more questions like, “Are you committed to hire students locally to support our missions that we are regional focused?”

Many of our students are commuters, like I mentioned earlier. We start to ask, “Do you offer public transportation or access to parking? How difficult might that be for students to get to your facility?” And that was helpful information to even helping employer to start to refine the posting to ask some of these elements to strengthen their applications list as well. “Do you have opportunity to align with our academic offering?” That is key as we think about our model to refine it more holistically and seeing what the best alignment that works. “How do you retain entry-level talents and how do you also grow their talent outside of the entry-level positions?”

As a result of that, we’re starting to work with the University to launch a new campaign that the University helped to focus on changing that institutional image and our new website was shown. I’m going to pull it up as we speak. And here’s a website that was built from our marketing communications office with the focus on tackling the institutional image mindset, “How can we now start to highlight the University impact in front of our legislators, our key government officials and our businesses within our state capital to start to think about position BSU as a place not just for teachings and not for-profit spaces or social workers, but also a place that they can find talents for research, for sciences, for our business community, for our business students, and even our liberal arts students as well?”

As a result, we created this entire website. The University launched a few million dollars campaign to roll out the BSU Work to highlight specifically the cybersecurity program as well and also hiring some of the sample sectors that our business community may not be familiar with that we actually had graduates working in as well that tied to our impact data, our outcomes data, along with businesses. I’m going to pose this … I’m going to share this really quick one, quick ad. That was RANFIELD TV campaign, for example.

Speaker 3:

… water State University is not just in the education business. BSU elevates business. Industry leaders hire BSU graduates for in-demand jobs in cybersecurity, engineering, finance and every other field on the rise. BSU grads are trained in top-tier facilities and tested through hands-on internships. When BSU grads enter the Massachusetts workforce, they don’t leave it, they lead it. Elevating business in Boston and beyond, BSU Works. Bridgewater State-

Gerald Tang:

So some of the people may ask me questions, “Why Boston?” As I mentioned earlier, we are public institutions with … Our state capital is Boston. So although we are very close to our colleagues, our fellow sister states in Rhode Island, our focus remained to center around Boston area with a couple of reasons. This campaign specifically focused in targeting for our business community and legislators and key government officials. So this is not really targeting our student prospective parents’ population, although that could be a secondary benefit when we roll out these campaign as well.

But the important part of this work is really to highlight some of the ways in which engagement can happen when businesses and local employers start to engage with the work that we do. And one of the things I appreciated about is, because we’re doing the employee engagement audit and sharing some of these key insight, the marketing communication team’s starting to link some of the resources through the [inaudible 00:42:04] website to our general website, which is on our uConnect website. And we created Hire Locally campaign. This is a full campaign that we were able to put together for, and thanks to uConnect and the virtual site to showcase what is the purpose of the Hire Locally campaign for both the regions, for students.

So we create now a creator kit on our Handshake system, so that students can just click on Hire Locally, be able to see what are their opportunity within 70-mile radius because many of our students are commuters that they don’t have to screen through every single possible opportunity in the sector, but they can look at regional focus to highlight opportunity in our space. We’re also highlighting why this is an important factors for us to consider when we think about our regional focus in our employee engagement strategies and then how can we support them in ways that they can connect with us. So that was helpful as a result of the products that the University already planned on doing. We’re just adding some more insight into the work as well.

So to jump back on, we will have some time for questions. So this is the time for you, if you have question you want to add onto the Q&A box, feel free to do so as well. So this is an example of a snapshot of a spreadsheet for the healthcare sector. Our strategy, like I mentioned earlier, focused now on, “How can we create these industry learning through different sector?” So we’re starting to group our sector based on our community models within uConnect and grouping different sectors that align with academic programs. And one thing you’ll notice instantly, we’re adding more notes about what their engagement has been, Hire Locally, whether they are one of the Hire Locally employers as indicator to confirm whether or not these are employee relationship they want to continue to go or not going.

And then we’re also adding information about what engagement, “Do they actually recruit students? Do they actually serve on advisory? Are they interested in doing those type of work that support the missions of the institution?” So what’s next from our end? We ultimately love to work on an employee engagement dashboards by industries, maybe something that will work with uConnect team once we are ready for this data and think about, “How can we display the information by industry sectors so that individual, whether or not students, prospective students or parents, our faculty and staff, our employee, alumni can see what our touchpoint might look like for each of the sectors and understanding how we define this particular strategy?”

We are hoping to expand our offering to have more industry-specific employment engagement and employee engagement staffing structured to support those efforts, so that our team’s starting to look at that particular sector and be able to connect with the trends and the growth in those spaces. We’re hoping to expand on our Employee Champions programs. I’m sure that many institutions may already have those. We’re starting to find ways to celebrate those and really focus on supporting their strategy and the business need while simultaneously supporting our needs and our institutional need.

This is a time where we’re also not starting to look at how do we really assess those relationships. To be quite honest, I still doesn’t have a clear answer yet, “How do we truly assess the quality of those relationship and how do we remove that from an individual relationship with potentially one employer recruiting contact or one particular individual, but take that into a institutional level or an organizational level?” And we have continued to refine our tier model. One of the interesting discovery as we are working on the … We finished with the healthcare sector. We’re starting to work in the art industry and we instantly discovered that we don’t have a lot of relationship either in the prospect space and also either in the two-partner space.

So that was super helpful for me as I’m trying to work with our colleagues within academic spaces to say, “Hey, who are we missing and what does our program offer that might help position us as a university into the art community?” So that was super helpful starting point, even though we don’t have a lot of current insight that we’ll share, but data point was helpful for us as we navigate that as well. I think that’s the last slide. I want to leave some time for Q&A. Here’s my contact information. If you want to connect and want to chat with me or want to talk more, want to say, “How much cool innovative things you guys are doing,” I certainly welcomes those discussions as well. So I’m going to stop sharing so you can see Meredith from … Hello again.

Meredith Metsker:

That was awesome, Gerald. I feel like you just gave us all your secret sauce.

Gerald Tang:

No secret because it’s not unique for me, right? But I guess the key lessons for me is we often just go at the, “Go, go, go, go, go,” scenario. So, “How often can we step back and say, ‘Wait, what are we doing and why are we doing this way?’” and that’s a key lessons learned for me. So nothing here is secret. So take them as you want. If you want to model them, be my guest. Collectively, we are helping to support the workforce. So let’s see, Dana asks, “What are your most effective method for engaging prospective employer?” That’s a very good questions and one thing we discover that it really depends on the industry sectors.

Some industry sectors prefer just direct outreach, “When I need, I will reach out to you,” scenario, but oftentimes we’re starting to center around the questions of, “What are our students need? Is their prospective employers came from and stem from the program alignments along with the student interest or the faculty input?” And those has been helpful information as we reach out to these prospective employers and say, “Here, they’re offering that we can provide to support their talents and their needs.” That was being brought up upfront rather than say, “Hey, I want to work with you. How can we make this work without the context?” So we provided context upfront and that has been helpful to drive those excitements and prospect into a conversation.

Hi, Lisa, “How do you handle employer that want more engagement, but do not believe they’re in alignment with your goals? Want more engagement than alignment with goals?” So it sounds like it’s where we might be in the tier where, “They want more, but we may not be able to offer,” scenario. And sometime we just have to be honest and I have honest conversation and say, “Oh, I appreciate you reaching out to us about these opportunity or ways to engage. Here are the things that we are looking for. Here are the things that our institution offer and our student demographic, our alumni interest.”

All of those data sources I just mentioned earlier, those are helpful things to help them to understand why some of the engagement might not lend their priorities and goal. So instead of me saying to them, “Sorry, I don’t really like working with you anymore,” now we have more of the data backing to support those effort. So that has been helpful in that way. And then one thing I’ll also do is, because we are part of the system, we share opportunity. We don’t have a program that aligns, maybe we direct them to other colleagues in the regions for program that actually of interest for them and we have personally refer them to connect with lovely colleagues in the region as well. Hope that answered your question.

Meredith Metsker:

Gerald, it looks like Mark in the Q&A thing, he asked if we can see or get those spreadsheet headings somewhere.

Gerald Tang:

Sure. Happy to share that. And, Meredith, I think you have the slide deck. You can just even pull that slide deck with that [inaudible 00:50:08].

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’ll go ahead and I’ll put that here in the chat, but also in the comments on the event, so you can go check it out later too.

Gerald Tang:

Awesome. Thank you for catching that. Any other things? Any other questions? Rebecca asked me, “How did you make the case for BSU to create employer-facing pages? We are open for business in other way …” Oh, the employer pages. The beauty is I don’t have to ask. They’re just like, “Well, it looks like there is an audit for …” One of the things that we talked about is the weakness pieces, institutional image. That was resonating with them. So the VP of marcomm and say, “Well, we need to do something about it. So let’s position our approach differently. What might be the key data source we want to highlight?”

So that, as a result, created that entire campaign. So I wasn’t involved in the full execution process, but we were involved in terms of the messaging itself. So they end up taking the lead in running that and creating an employee-facing page. Then you said, “Have you had an employee who say they do their own events, you can get to engage with you individually?” I’m assuming you meant their own, let’s say, open houses and programs. If that’s the case, then I would say, yeah, we’re open for that. It doesn’t necessarily link it into our employee engagement model, but those are helpful informations for us to know.

So we might not move an employee from one tier to the other. We might still cap them into the same category as an eye out for it because that’s helpful for our students to be able to access, but doesn’t necessarily mean for me that it’s a partner for the University. So that’s where we’re starting to move around it. Our goal is that the employer dashboards might trigger some of those questions, say, “Hey, I want to be on it. I’ve been working with you. How come we don’t?” That might open the door for us to have those more fruitful conversation with these employer who want to do their own thing, which is fine, but also do they hit some of these category or insight that we are thinking about from the University level or also say from the departmental level that we ultimately get to the University level?

Meredith Metsker:

There’s another question in the Q&A box for you, Gerald, from Mark. Question about career service website, which I know you probably have some thoughts on.

Gerald Tang:

First, if you haven’t worked with uConnect, not shameless plug here, but do you, right? They’ve been fantastic. And one of the key aspect is, if you can find things on the website, they automatically cancel you out. Sadly, we are a cancel-culture spaces, right? If employer or alumni or students or prospective student cannot find information on your website, that means it’s not helpful for that. I’m not encouraging you to add everything on it, but it’s really thinking about what may center important things into your website for a key area. So we actually move on from a UConnect website. We move some of the things around you to highlight key aspect to remove some of the pages to be more the menu option rather than front and center to help streamline that with the less and more still scenario. So hopefully that answered the questions.

I know it’s at time, don’t want to hold colleagues up. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I’m on LinkedIn. Pretty often I’m on uConnect in the Career Everywhere community, but we appreciate taking the time to chat with me today. Meredith, always great to see you. I look forward to seeing you in person potentially-

Meredith Metsker:

Yes, I do.

Gerald Tang:

… in my space in Boston in the summertime. So folks, if you have more questions, thank you, feel free to reach out. Until next time, see you guys later.