There’s no need to fear a the new recruiting reality

Prior to the global pandemic, Vietnam was a target market for international admissions officials looking to diversify their student bodies. But, in 2020–like it or not–school recruiters were forced to swap their long haul flights for Zoom calls and kiss their United Airlines 1K statuses a sad goodbye. Grounded. Deskbound. Call it what you will, but the music had finally stopped on the jet set world of overseas student recruitment. 

There has been real pain: revenue losses from lower international enrollment have reduced entire admissions departments to skeleton crews. Other programs, especially short-term intensive English courses, have disappeared completely. Few universities thought the party would ever end, and even fewer took steps to insure themselves against potential losses from an enrollment drop. 

The music had to stop sometime

The decade between 2009-2019 was, for many, a cocktail-in-hand ride around the world on recruitment tours that increasingly blurred the lines between exotic vacations and actual business travel.

Fourdozen is a digital marketing company in Vietnam with deep roots in student recruitment. The pandemic put an end to all of our marketing work for in-person recruitment events, and it meant we wouldn’t be seeing our friends in admissions anymore, as their regular trips to Hanoi were cancelled indefinitely.

While newly released vaccines give us all the hope of an eventual return to travel for recruitment, there is good reason to believe that this new normal is here to stay. We see three key trends that will impact recruitment marketing going forward, and will likely prevent us from spending happy hour with our favorite partners for some years to come:

• International student enrollment numbers will ebb and flow, but continue to grow in the long term.
• In-person recruitment events are unlikely to return to their pre-pandemic size and scale in the medium-term given the logistical challenges of a global vaccine rollout and the fragmented nature of entry/exit requirements for foreigners traveling abroad. In addition, school travel policies for their staff are likely to err on the side of caution.
• Enrollment managers, with the experience of operating admissions teams on lean budgets in the pandemic, will be more reluctant to spend on flights, hotels, and recruitment tours. This means more online recruitment marketing and advertising.

The new reality: no more easy money

These trends have emerged during the past year, and are rapidly solidifying into the new recruitment reality: dollars spent must directly relate to the KPIs that underpin ROI and increased international enrollment. Fourdozen began pioneering digital marketing services for admissions officials well before COVID-19 using some of the key metrics available to digital marketers like CPC, CPM, cost per conversion and video playthroughs. Today, our digital marketing services are used by more than 50 institutions worldwide.

The digital recruitment landscape will continue to change rapidly over the coming months. As much as we hope for a return to how things used to be, we are also aware of the need to adapt and prepare for the future.