Recruiting services:Headed by Michel Lemay
Headed by Michel Lemay, Recruiting services had several objectives, all of which focused on enticing the best students to register for HEC Montréal programs. The services’ primary mission was to follow up on inquiries received by the Office of the Registrar. Based on notes taken by its staff, employees contacted prospective students, asking them whether they had all the information they needed to make a decision and promoting HEC Montréal as their best option. In this way, they sought to engage with candidates to nurture relationships that would convince them to become HEC Montréal students. These efforts could take time to produce results, however. It was not uncommon for prospective MBA students to contact HEC Montréal two or three years before they finally applied to the program. Recruiting services, therefore, had to keep its contact lists to ensure that regular follow-ups were done to maintain the school’s relationship with prospective students.
Another important component of the services’ mission was to attend education fairs1 around the world to promote the school and answer questions from international students in person. In this case, prospective students provided their contact information on paper, and staff members later input the data into Excel spreadsheets similar to those used by the Office of the Registrar. Although education fairs could yield positive results in terms of establishing relationships with prospective students in some markets (e.g., China, India), the school’s budget for attending them was limited. Given the fierce competition among institutions of higher education, deciding which fairs to attend was an ongoing challenge.
Recruiting services was also in charge of maintaining the school’s online presence. This involved launching recruitment campaigns via email or on social networks (e.g., LinkedIn), understanding how people landed on HEC Montréal’s website and how they searched for information once they
1 e.g., http://www.nationaleducationfair.com/n/en/home/
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This document is authorized for use only by mesut yildiz in APM Fall 2022 taught by SUSAN STEVENS, Endicott College from Sep 2022 to Dec 2022.
From Students to Alumni: Implementing CRM to Build Lifelong Relationships at HEC Montréal – Part A
© HEC Montréal 5
were there, and holding webinars where prospective students could watch interactive presentations of the school and its programs and ask questions in real time. Here again, decisions had to be made about how best to use HEC Montréal’s limited recruiting budget to ensure the best students would apply.
So far, efforts to coordinate those initiatives had proved unsatisfactory. As mentioned, the data collected by human agents (e.g., staff at the Office of the Registrar) was not always accurate. At education fairs, information was also taken down on paper before being entered into a spreadsheet, creating further opportunities for error. Finally, the selection and management of recruitment channels was often based on habit and intuition rather than hard evidence. The school might hold an open house at the same time as its parent institution, Université de Montréal, for example, without questioning whether the day and time of the open house was suitable for the school’s clientele. Finally, Recruiting services gathered no data on students who didn’t end up registering. There was no way to know why some people decided not to attend HEC Montréal, but that information could have proven invaluable to efforts to attract those “lost” students (e.g., by adapting course schedules in some programs). Overall, the fragmentation of those interactions created silos across the student lifecycle at HEC, making it impossible to generate a comprehensive overview of the process.