Is Artificial Intelligence about to revolutionise how you recruit students?
Advent Group Higher Education Services
#1 Graduate Recruitment Event Organiser
As business schools know, attracting and selecting the best students is both a numbers game and about personal connection. When faced with a world of data and automation, it is easy to think the personal touch is about to be phased out or discarded. So is this really the case? What role do AI and data really have in a student recruitment strategy? And how can it answer the challenges that higher education institutions face in 2023?
Challenges for Higher Education in 2023
Recently, Advent Group Higher Education Services Group surveyed admissions professionals across five continents to better understand the challenges they are facing this year. What was strikingly clear is that financial instability is of concern to both students and institutions alike. 53% of the surveyed higher education professionals strongly agree that economic uncertainty is going to cause problems in terms of enrolment. What we are seeing is that emerging and continuing turbulence, whether economic, from conflict, or to do with climate change, is very much on higher education’s radar.
Travel restrictions, visa requirements, a dynamically changing environment, and international conflicts also featured in these professionals’ top concerns regarding enrolment.
Well-designed AI can save time and money in this turbulent environment where variables are constantly shifting. Because AI deals with data in a responsive way, it can handle the scale and shocks of a fluctuating global data set. You can think of it this way: you want to recruit excellent students from across the world to a nuanced set of criteria and you want to make the most of opportunities as they arise. AI can help you do that.
The Importance of Quality Data
Seeing this potential, Advent Group created @Unimy back in 2019. One thing Unimy does is use AI to enable prospective candidates from across the world to find the best business programs for them, accounting for a wide range of criteria from both the candidate’s and the school’s side. Amongst the hype surrounding AI, sometimes caution is lost and one thing to bear in mind is that with any AI, you are only as good as your data. Advent Group’s 20 years of experience of face-to-face student recruitment events are the basis of our model. Unimy’s AI is constantly enriched by over 150 annual education events, and fuelled by data from 1 million candidate profiles in 70 countries.
All of those real-life interactions, pieces of feedback, and interpersonal dynamics are essential to the quality and complexity of its performance.
We would do well to not be blindly impressed by the mystery of the AI black box but to think analytically - what is the data here? And is it rich enough and accurate enough to produce the results I need? Or, in simpler terms, do the people that made this machine know what they are talking about?
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New Ways for Candidates to Discover their Best Fit
Matching to complex criteria is one thing, but Unimy wanted to go deeper and get even closer to using data to measure something only previously done through human relationships and communication. Starting in 2019, Unimy developed its research into the cultural features of business schools - measuring their values, characters, and ways of working; and then using this data to enable candidates to find schools that are a cultural fit. This assessment of over 130 top schools’ cultures became a quantitative stepping stone into the qualitative world of culture, community, and personality. Its insights can also reveal useful information about a school’s cultural identity that helps define what makes it unique.
Making AI Work for You
So, what is the healthy balance between AI and human expertise? As founders and masters of the one-to-one MBA recruitment event, Advent Group knows better than anyone how valuable the human factor is. In our recent research amongst higher education professionals, we saw a continuing hunger to return to in-person events post-pandemic - and we have experienced the same enthusiasm at our events all over the world throughout 2022.
The magic of a real connection is more important than ever. But does adopting AI counterpose this? No. Where one-on-one meetings provide depth, AI helps you prepare for that depth across a greater scale.
Pre-selecting candidates using AI makes a lot of sense as it gives recruiters and consultants time to form a personal connection with candidates who are true potentials for your school. What’s more, even within Unimy, human skills complete our machinery. Every matched candidate is assessed by an expert before they are put forward to clients. And Unimy’s own consultants, Unimy and Beyond, know the value of securing top applicants through personal communication. Even if you exist within our digital services sphere, human intelligence is an essential part of the package.???
A balanced picture emerges therefore - not AI replacing human skills but AI doing what machines do well and freeing humans up to undertake the endeavours where human intelligence really shines. The humans within student recruitment teams are no exception! After all, we all need more time to focus on what really matters.
?? Contact Thelma Georgiev or email us at [email protected] to schedule a personalized meeting to discuss our AI recruitment solutions
Discover more at unimy.com and learn about our innovative cultural fit research at unimy.com/fit