(IDG) -- Several years ago, the information systems organization at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp. gave a summer job to the son of one of its managers, a college student majoring in computer science at a small Midwestern university. That fall, the fledgling IT professional spread the word about his great job. The next summer, another student joined the team for three months. And the next year, another came.

Now, Michael Prince, Burlington's CIO, is assessing how to expand the informal relationship with the school into an effective, full-blown campus recruiting program. Taking a cue from its success, and from other Burlington departments that have established campus recruiting, he says he hopes to hit several colleges in November to bring some December graduates on board. Next spring, he will start recruiting May graduates.

Prince says he's tired of the "endless cycle of job placement firms placing people with us and then recruiting them away from us." He hopes that bringing in younger, motivated professionals will help give his organization an edge. Burlington has a progressive information technology environment reliant upon advanced technologies, and Prince says he needs object-oriented programming (OOP) skill sets such as Java.

"We can retrain our current programmers to acquire some of the OOP skill sets, but we can benefit from bringing in new people who learn those skills in an academic environment and start out life with an OOP orientation," Prince says. "We are at a turning point in the way we create and integrate applications. The type of people we'll recruit can bring in skills in new disciplines that the organization needs to embrace."

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE

IDG.net home page

Computerworld's home page

Computerworld "Emmerce"

Get Media Grok and The Industry Standard Intelligencer delivered for free

Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net

IDG.net's personal news page

Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you

Search IDG.net in 12 languages

Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletter for IT leaders

News Radio

Computerworld Minute

Fusion audio primers

Burlington may be a little late to the game this year. College seniors who are majoring in computer science and IT degree programs know they're in demand. And they're probably already talking to their first employers. Many May graduates will have several offers by the time they go home for the holiday break.

But Prince has the right idea: Companies that have a tradition of campus recruiting say they are finding between 20% and 50% of all new hires in university halls. And employers as diverse as Burlington, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of South Carolina and Fleet Financial Group Inc. are starting up aggressive campus recruiting programs.

With the new competition on campus, employers with proven track records are fine-tuning their IT recruitment programs. They are targeting campuses in the early fall instead of waiting until the spring.

Tougher sell

And they are coming to terms with some new realities. Besides starting earlier, they are finding they have to offer higher salaries and are grappling with a much savvier job hunter than in years past. IT grads know what they're worth on the open market. They know they can expect multiple job offers. And they have grown much more patient at playing the waiting game.

So, in addition to the traditional campus career fairs and interviews set up through the campus career office, companies are expanding their campus recruiting in innovative ways that generate positive word of mouth among students and faculty. They're offering internship programs, sitting on curriculum advisory committees, participating in class lectures, hosting on-site industry days and seeking any and all other opportunities to impress prospective recruits.

Caterpillar Inc., for example, matches an IT leader with one of its 30 target schools each year. That allows the manager to develop a one-on-one relationship with the faculty and staff. That manager will visit the school several extra times outside of regular recruiting trips for speaking engagements and informal information sessions. In June, the company invited several professors and career counselors from each of its schools to a two-day event at headquarters called University Days.

"It's all part of developing good college relations," says Mike Zimmerman, IT recruiting coordinator at Caterpillar. "We help them understand our needs and our business, and can have a dialogue with them about their programs."

All the effort is critical to Caterpillar's future, Zimmerman notes. The company plans to hire about 100 college graduates during the 1998-99 academic year — or about half of its total new hires — for Cobol, C, C++, Java and Windows NT application development positions. Of the 100 entry-level graduates, approximately 15% will come from Caterpillar's internship program, Zimmerman says.

Other employers that offer internships say that, besides helping with staff shortages, the programs are effective in developing strong relationships with schools and gaining name recognition among students.

"One of the hidden benefits is you get good word of mouth back on campus," says Jim Bates, systems manager at CUNA Mutual Insurance Society in Madison, Wis., an insurance and financial services company that works with credit unions. "That's invaluable because you can't get that with a brochure. I've had a number of people say, 'I'd never heard of CUNA, but my friend had an internship there, and I want to know more.'"

Early admissions

Some employers are finding that they can't wait for students to enter college, however. Another emerging strategy that offers some of the same benefits as an internship program is high-school recruiting.

"There are simply not enough college students to accommodate the needs of the state of South Carolina. We feel we have to go all the way back to the high-school level to promote IS as a career choice," says Alice McCrory, IT director at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of South Carolina in Columbia. "It costs us in the neighborhood of $2,000, and it is absolutely a good investment."

Facing the year 2000 problem, as well as the IT supply-and-demand gap, the insurance company began college recruiting last spring. It hired about 50 campus recruits for entry-level programmer positions in the program's first 18 months. But McCrory says she quickly realized that targeting college students wasn't enough to meet the long-term challenge of staffing her organization.

The company has joined forces with another large local employer, Policy Management Systems Corp., also in Columbia, S.C., and two universities to offer college-level IT courses to high-school juniors and seniors. If students eventually enroll in the computer science program at one of the two schools, the courses will count toward their degrees. Blue Cross and Policy Management fund the program and pay for textbooks.

Although employers are scrambling to get students' attention, even at the high-school level, they aren't straying too far outside of traditional computer science and IT degree programs to find new recruits.

Professionalism 101

If campus recruiting has one drawback, it's the extra training necessary to transform a student fresh out of the ivory tower into a polished IT professional. Today's college students have the advantage of having grown up using computers. But in other ways they are less prepared for the "real world" of employment than employers would like.

Entry-level training programs, in addition to acquainting new recruits with a company's IT procedures, tools and methodologies, try to shape slackers into go-getters.

McCrory says she has lost about a half-dozen new recruits who couldn't come to terms with the demands of the professional environment. "They just didn't get it," she says. "They don't understand what it means to be responsible. They have car trouble, for instance, and they just don't show up and don't call their supervisor — things a teen-ager would do."

McCrory made two separate curricula for the company's 10-week training program, one that focuses on IT and one that teaches "what it means to be a professional: dressing right, acting right, being prepared for meetings — all the things you think would be intuitive, but aren't necessarily." After training, each new recruit is assigned to a mentor, who also helps with the rough spots.

The Carlson Cos., a Minneapolis-based organization that owns hotel and restaurant chains, including Raddison Hotels International Inc. and TGI Friday's Inc., also has a two-pronged IT training effort. Carlson's IT Foundations program emphasizes the technology environment shared across each of the company's four operating groups, while SMART (Student Mentoring and Readiness Training) concentrates on the less tangible aspects of the job.

"We have to teach them that in a corporate environment, everything is on a constant rate of change," explains Dave Zitur, senior director of IT. "They have to learn to make decisions based on an understanding of all the potential consequences in a changing world."

But Carlson, which started campus recruiting only a few years ago, is starting to see just how much effort will be required, Zitur says. "This is a long-term effort — the payoff is five to seven years down the road," he says. "But I think people will stay and be loyal to Carlson, and that will make us more productive. The payoff is long term, and you have to believe in it."

Goff is a freelance writer in New York.