HE marketing and recruitment tips: Watch your words!
Watch your words?
One thing that often slips the minds of HE marketing and recruitment professionals is to look at their application forms. They spend huge budgets generating the applicants and then, at the final hurdle, destroy the great customer experience by presenting nasty application forms.
Even if you are still using paper based, pdf or some online forms you need to carefully look at them. Most clients that I work with haven’t refreshed their forms in 4-5 years but the expectations of their ‘customers’ have moved on leaps in this time. 4-5 years ago your customers applicants were happy to post paperwork, happy to photocopy docs – now they expect more…….damn Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and others have pushed out the expectations!
HE Application Form Checklist
Here’s the first thing I ask all marketing, admissions and academics that I work with to do: fill out one of your own applications and ask your self these questions:
- is it clear what I expect my applicants to fill out?
- are the questions presented course relevant?
- do the questions I ask enable my academics to make fast offers?
- could I have prompted for more specific answers?
- were there unnecessary questions for my course?
- after I’ve collected this application does a member of staff have to follow up for more info?
- does my form clearly tell my applicant what they are thinking; “what happens next?”
“Productivity and a better service to our applicants – two crucial benefits of CampusIT''s Interact online solution that make it easier for applicants to apply for our courses and make our process more productive.”