Virtual Recruitment - a successful campaign to match in-person efforts
Recruitment can seem like a very daunting task when you’ve just started out as a Challenge Leader. For me, because of COVID-19 and the fact that I joined the programme late, I relied heavily on virtual recruitment to get my team together. Through this blog, I am hoping to share some things I learned along the way and hopefully help you get the most out of your virtual recruitment. Sound good? Let’s do it!
So let’s start at the start. The first step is to choose your platform(s). Considering the target audience of your posts are students, you want to use the platforms that the students at your university are active on. Personally, I created a challenge specific Instagram account and then used the information meeting event on Facebook to share some of the Instagram posts on Facebook as well. What are the kind of posts that work well? From my experience, the following are useful in getting your challenge out there and getting people to sign up for the information meetings:
Trek introduction video: create a quick elevator style pitch video to introduce yourself (put a face to the challenge to build some trust along the way!) and the trek to the account.
Trek itinerary/route to provide the viewer with some more details about the challenge itself
Fundraising post to elaborate on the fundraising aspect of the trip: what work does the charity do, how will the fundraising help them, what skills can fundraising build, etc.
Info meeting details: spam your account with the details of your information meeting(s) to get as many people to sign up as possible!
Q&A stories: let users ask questions and post the answers for everyone to see. Can even save these into a highlights to create your own FAQ page.
Team member introductions: as people join your team, introduce them on your account! This can help inspire others and keep the trek active.
To create these posts, I used Canva in combination with the pictures and videos provided by Choose a Challenge on the Challenge Leader Hub to make them aesthetically appealing. I’ve found that keeping the posts short and sweet works best; put only the essential info on the photos and elaborate in the caption (and be sure to use some emojis to make it more interactive!).
Once you’ve got your posts together, how do you get them out there? Naturally, posting on your own account is step one. Optimal posting times tend to be when students are online; posts that I posted between 10am-12 and 6-8pm usually got the most interaction. On top of that, you want to make sure that your account stays active, by posting something at least every few days. A good way to optimise the timing and frequency of your posts is to use a scheduling app like Hootsuite. Not only does this let you make a solid virtual recruitment plan, but it can automatically post your posts for you at the times you specify!
Last but certainly not least, get people to share your posts! I asked all of my friends and family to share the trek info post on their accounts and made sure to post about the challenge on all the university / overheard Facebook groups I could find. Secondly, I contacted the sports clubs within my university and asked them to share the post on their social media. In particular, I created a few personalised posts for the trek specific societies like the mountaineering society, hiking club, etc. as their members are most likely to be interested in your challenge!
And that concludes the short rundown of how I approached virtual recruitment, which worked out quite well for me! As a takeaway, I’d like to emphasise that even if you are in a position to do loads of in person advertising for your trek, adding such a virtual recruitment campaign on top is a great way to keep the trek active and remind those who are interested to sign up!
Written by:
Melanie Meijer
-Cardiff Kilimanjaro 2021/22 Challenge Leader
