Like many other firms that rely on students as seasonal labor, you are experiencing the effects of a population with many choices. Universities and students have changed dramatically in the last few years, yet most college recruiting programs still focus on going to career centers and career fairs. Today's students are barraged by opportunities, most of which come from multibillion-dollar organizations with experienced marketing know-how to get their opportunity in front of the target--and get the student to say yes. Recruiting college students today is all about marketing, and more specifically, about making sure your opportunity does not blend in with all the other background noise.

Marketing approaches are many. Consider the following tools and strategies to help get you started:

• Students want to work at companies that get talked about. Use market research and on-campus reps to tell you what is "in and out" on campus. You need to recruit with "an attitude" if you want to be successful. Identify opinion leaders and get their advice on what it takes to build your image on their campus. Trends change rapidly and are not the same on all campuses. Constant market research is an absolute requirement if you want to be perceived as something other than "just another summer job."

• Recruit students and former summer hires to sit on your college recruiting advisory committee. Let them tell you what is cool, and develop the tools needed to get your firm talked about.

• Start early. Most organizations that try to hire students think that they can swoop in just prior to graduation and recruit decent students, which just isn't true anymore. Most students today are employed, so you will need time to woo them. Since you are a summer camp, think about holding a spring break recruiting fest. Once you get them to your camp, show them that working there can be fun. Remember, however, that it is spring break.

• Don't be a "seagull," a firm that flies in once a year, drops a load of crap, and then flies away. Build a long-term relationship with student groups, alumni associations, influential students, and faculty. Make your presence on specific campuses known all year long.

• Sponsor student groups in your targeted departments and speak at their meetings to get exposure.

• Hire on-campus representatives (students in psychology or the key major you are targeting) to help you gather information and identify interested students. Use your summer hires as full time on-campus reps and recruiters.

• Offer to hire students and their "best friend" as a team to improve your chances of getting the best.

• Pay your outgoing summer hires to tell you what they liked and didn't like about working with your firm for the summer. Consistently try to eliminate as much of what your hires didn't like as possible. You want them and your campers to have the time of their lives so that when they go home, it is all they talk about.

You have already correctly identified the fact that things such as GPA and courses completed are not always good indicators of how well someone will perform at a job. Even if an employee has some of the basic prerequisites and ability to perform a job, without the proper fit into your work environment, and the right motivation, it's unlikely the new hire will last long.

I have two recommendations that may go a long way toward helping you determine if graduating college students will be a good fit for your organization.

1. Understand the characteristics that define success. The most critical thing in this situation is that you somehow operationally define the exact traits you think are required for success at the positions you are seeking to fill. Be sure to consider both hard skills--such as intelligence and specific technical knowledge--as well as soft skills like personality attributes (i.e., dependability, interpersonal skills, teamwork orientation, and customer service). Finally, it is important that you understand and clearly define the values and culture of your own organization, so that you know what it takes for someone to fit.

2. Evaluate candidates based on the characteristics you have identified. While there are many possible tools available to help persons in your situation make better hiring decisions, upgrading your interviewing process to include a structured, situational interview is an excellent starting place. This type of interview presents applicants with a set of questions about how they might handle (or have handled) a certain situation. You can use the characteristics you have identified to create the questions you ask in the interview.

For instance, if customer service skills are important, you might present the applicant with a scenario that requires them to discuss how they might handle a difficult situation with a customer. Their answer will provide you insight into how they might handle an actual customer complaint or issue. You could build questions around the core work values held by your organization. In this type of interview, it's critical to ask each candidate the same questions, and to provide interviewers with a rating scale to be used when evaluating responses. This ensures that you will use the same information when making head-to-head comparisons of candidates.

If adding a structured interview isn't enough for you, consider using a good personality or work-values assessment. These assessments can help you identify applicants who are a good fit for your environment. There are a variety of these tools available on the market.

Develop an accurate job profile of the position that you are seeking to fill
When constructing a house, you start by building a great foundation. The same holds true for recruiting. To efficiently search for the right candidate, you need to develop a detailed and accurate job profile of the skills and requirements of the position. This permits recruiters to sound more credible to the applicants, thus increasing your chances of attracting a higher level of applicant.

Develop a sourcing strategy
Once a recruiter develops the job profile, the next task is to develop a plan for finding great applicants. In this plan, referred to as a sourcing strategy, a recruiter should cast a wide net. Try to use as many sourcing means as your budget will allow. Typical sourcing means include:

• Posting the position on the company's career site
• Posting on certain national paid sites
• Positing on certain niche sites
• Resume databases
• Ads in print media
• Job fairs
• Employee referrals
• Networking by the recruiter
• Cold calls

Statistics show that a higher percentage of hires come from employee referrals and networking by the recruiter, so make sure that you concentrate in these areas.

Develop and screen an applicant pool
Once you implement a sourcing strategy, you should begin to develop an applicant pool. Out of this applicant pool, you will develop candidates for the interview process. If you are not developing a decent applicant pool, you must revisit your sourcing strategy and make changes.

If you have developed a decent applicant pool, then you need to begin to screen the applicants to develop a list of candidates for the position. Generally, the recruiter does an initial phone screen on promising applicants and then develops a group of candidates to go to the next step (either a phone screen by the hiring manager or right to an on-site interview).

On-Site interviews and assessment
Promising candidates are brought in for on-site interviews. This gives both the recruiter and hiring manager an opportunity to meet the candidate face to face and do a more in-depth analysis of his/her background.

Negotiating/extending offer/closing candidate
During the interview process, the recruiter should broach the subject of compensation requirements with a candidate. The recruiter, along with the hiring manager, will develop a fair employment offer based on the company's budget for the position. Once the candidate verbally accepts the offer, follow it up with a formal written offer. Closing a deal with candidate may be most difficult piece of the process. It is important to have an accurate idea of what the market is for each hiring position before an offer is extended. This improves your odds.

A symptom can often be used to diagnose the wrong disease. All too often we assume an uncooperative hiring manager is an uninvolved or lazy hiring manager. Often, that is not the case. Many hiring managers divorce themselves from writing job position descriptions and the other requirements of human resources and staffing due to past learned experiences. For example:

• They rarely hire candidates from the HR/staffing process.

• Hiring managers often hire on a whim, what they call instinct, and therefore see the effort put into a defined position description as a waste of time ("I'll know the right hires when I see them").

• The value of a good description has never been explained to them. They have been told to do it, but it has never been explained why it benefits them.

• They may feel that writing a job description is "doing your job."

• Hiring managers often feel that HR/Staffing does very little to prescreen responses to recruiting efforts and therefore find little value in "defining the position," if that effort is not going to be used to screen candidates. Many hiring managers feel that HR/staffing does little more than correct spelling errors in candidates' resumes.

Your goal should be to develop a partnership with your hiring managers. As such, it is your responsibility to ensure they completely understand the process, your role within that process, and their critical contributions to that process. Further, it is your responsibility to produce results when they do cooperate. You may be the person they see as responsible for running the hiring mechanisms and handling the paperwork, but they have to realize they must live with that process's outcome: the hire.

If hiring managers are reluctant, ask them to assist you in developing the initial job descriptions. Ask them to name their most successful employee functioning in a related role. That will ensure the description contains that employee's key attributes, both subjective and objective.

Then comes the tough part: to send them matching candidates. In the majority of cases I have investigated, previous bad experiences have taught hiring managers to be uncooperative. It therefore falls on you to re-educate them.

A contractor cannot build a good house without a firm foundation, correctly laid out in compliance with the needs of the finished structure. Similarly, a good hire cannot occur without a good position description.

One great suggestion is to build a database of these candidates and send an e-mail newsletter to each of them every month. This will help to brand your company's image with them, as well as bring the candidates up to date on new projects/contracts acquired, company news, internal promotions, etc.

Allow these candidates to learn as much as they can about your company. Be honest and tell them that you will have interest in their skills at some future point. Try to do as much as you can to brand your company as an "employer of choice." Most candidates will be willing to wait until the time is right for you to hire them.

The first three rules of all recruiting are: 1) relationship building; 2) relationship building; and 3) relationship building.

All great recruiters build relationships, and those relationships lead to sales. It rarely works the other way around. The first lesson in relationship building is that even when your goal may be selfish, the effort must appear selfless.

The medical profession and industries closely associated with it operate with an elevated sense of importance. When your business is human life and good health, it is hard to imagine otherwise. Since the medical field is also one of the most demanding from an educational point of view, it also tends to have a lower opinion of those from the "outside." It is imperative for recruiters to work extra hard to be identified as a member in good standing with the local medical community, as a third party. (There are those who are MDs and those who are not. Never forget your place.)

Just as you routinely network with recruiting professionals, do so also with the medical community. Do not recruit or sell at these events; you do not build relationships with a sales pitch or a price list stapled to your lapel or a sales pitch in your mouth. There is no quick way to build relationships; it is a time-consuming effort that requires patience to succeed and one impetuous act to fail.

Start tracking events sponsored within your area's medical community that align with your area of recruiting interest. Buy a ticket to annual medical dinners, and perhaps even sponsor a table if possible. Send letters and articles to media outlets on topics relating to staffing, recruiting, job-seeking, or other topics that you can intelligently address. Do not cross the line and give your opinion where only those within the medical profession should speak. Nothing irritates a professional more than an amateur with an agenda speaking out of turn.

Send articles or information of interest to the contacts you develop. Comment on articles you have seen or read regarding their product, product line, industry, specialty, research, honors, or awards. This is a clear signal that you are a member of the community.

Successful sales professionals can sense when the time is right to convert the relationship from "building" to "built." Introduce the service you offer when you sense the time is right. One clear signal is to wait for the first time the person actually sounds happy you called or actually remembers who you are.

The goal is to make the people you contact comfortable doing business with you. They have choices. They will do business with people they like first. Make no secret of what you do--just do not sell.