The "imitation game" of student recruitment

A lot changed in the Spring and Fall of 2020 for international institutions and students who are keen to study abroad. Irrespective of the destination or the source regions, everyone got impacted. The rest of the story is well known amongst the international mobility stakeholders, and in this post of mine, I am not going to remind you about those issues.

I am rather going to focus on how some in the domain got smarter while some couldn't.

In the coming years (starting from the 2022 and 2023 recruitment cycles), this will be a differentiating factor - impacting the future of a lot of admissions teams/ directors as well as vendors.

When I say some got smarter, I mean they got smarter in redefining their priorities and therefore their choice of student recruitment channels, to the extent of pushing higher accountability to the service layer. The pre-COVID slack that the service layer was used to operating with, had to end for the good of everyone. No rosy rankings and superfluous congregations (as I call those innumerable conferences full of wining and dining) could hide the lack of true solutions that should have served the institutions well.

What can be expected from solution providers who were praying for mobility to open up again so that they could be back in the business? What can be expected of slackers who have been, for many years now, irresponsibly taking schools/institutions for granted with bad ROI?

When Libereka went to the market in 2020, our verified lead gen solution won the hearts allowing some of the best-known business schools and Universities to sign up.

We delivered results with a guarantee (and we still do) but we wanted to know how things evolved over the next 2 years, and boy we weren't disappointed!

While the solution was novel and assured 100% correct details of candidates who were keen to study a specific program at a specific destination, downsizing of admissions teams and other resourcing challenges hit everyone hard and that meant lesser bandwidth to speak to and convert such verified leads to applications.

Those who could, got fantastic results (with the likes of ULaw in the U.K getting more than 40 applications and 7 enrollments from the leads) every season. That sort of conversion is something that I haven't seen since I left Pagalguy many years back. Even large rankings publishers (one of whom I had worked for) never delivered such results.

However, the nagging challenge of bandwidth headaches and resourcing issues to generate a direct attribution to KPIs (Applications, at the least) wasn't going away. In fact, it became worse after things apparently "opened up" because now everyone wanted to travel and "meet" students. Not sure why that was logical (given that the migration to a digital experience and dependency on digital systems is a behavioural change for students over at least 2 years now). I don't have data on how those things are working out (you know, meeting students offline through physical fairs and how those are converting to applications) but the fact remains that what didn't work well pre-pandemic can't suddenly work wonders just because people are about to travel or are keen to continue playing the imitation game.

Over the past 18 months, we have been asking such questions to everyone who became a partner and did or did not have their desired KPI attributions. What became clear is that we needed a solution that actually goes to the end of the funnel and delivers tangible, qualified and eligible applications rather than verified leads.

Thus was born the HEQA solution. This highly engaged qualified applications subscription delivering a minimum guaranteed number of qualified applications to clients got adopted at a fast pace. We weren't sure if it will be picked up by some of the better institutions or business schools and it was surprising to see the adoption there too. HEQA suddenly has overtaken everything we think and do at Libereka. Although we are already working on an advanced version of the product already, the current version of delivering qualified & eligible applications through an on-demand digital event campaign targeted to specific regions - is seeing fantastic adoption.

Listening to the pain points and issue of our partners did help, but we had to ensure that our service blueprint was upgraded to support this delivery. It is not every day that a service provider can stand up and proudly claim that any cost will be refunded if the minimum delivery promise is not met. We are talking about eligible and qualified applications here, not leads or meetings or other such glorified leads. Those don't mean anything to schools if they can't be attributable to direct applications.

Libereka is a D2C (direct to customers/ candidates) platform and that means the strength of the platform is to deliver direct results for universities/business schools. Not all programs are created/designed as equals and not all are ranked (or even possible to rank) to generate augmented demand from all markets. Not all programs are also lucky to have a diverse set of candidates in the classroom. Lastly, not all programs get the same number of applications to convert to offers and admits.

Libereka is solving this set of problems and I am proud of the team working with me tirelessly to continue delivering the goods. A rather lean and fit team indeed.

If you are in student recruitment at your business schools or university (international office), what do you think is smart? Spending on physical events or campaigns that may or may not convert OR investing in something that delivers assured results? This may not be a hard one to answer.