Speed in student recruitment is today extremely relevant.

Universities are increasingly learning how to be more student-centric, how to be more customer service-oriented, how to improve processes and use data better. But are HEIs fast as they should in speeding their recruitment process up?

The Italian scenario

In Italy, the best equipped universities are organised in two main strands. The first, for the Italian students, who basically can enroll up to literally days before the beginning of term time. The second, for international students, who follow the calls HEIs maintain open for that scope.

Institutions that do not differentiate, thus that treat international prospects like the Italians, usually simply do not enroll a sizable amount of foreign students.

Since admissions ought to follow marketing, and marketing is nowadays morphing at the speed of light, admission processes need be re-designed to respond to the fundsamental need. That is converting applications into enrollments.

Unfortunately this is not the case for a good number of (Italian) HEIs, this mainly due to the lack of human resources assigned to their admission units.

Digital management of applications

Universities are progressively investing in the student experience, in the advising, in the academic design, but are still failing the streamlining of the admissions process.

Outside there, digital marketing has overtaken traditional marketing. Internationally, the vast majority of the digital marketing budget is today spent boosting HEIs visibility on search engines (SEO), in social media advertising, and -to a lesser extent- in portals.

In Italy, evidence shows budget is first allocated in the traditional recruitment instruments, i.e. fairs and agents. The on-line pillar is somehow overturned: portals, then social media, and SEO at the bottom of the list.

In a time of global pandemic, the vast majority of international prospective students use on line tools, not agents nor fairs (which keep a fundamental role in international branding of an institution).

Using on line tools, prospects expect immediate results, which rarely are guaranteed by HEIs. Therefore, unless that prospective student is searching for an Italian option only (which is rarely the case), they’d turn around to other academic systems.