An overview of some handy tips when recruiting student ambassadors for Higher Education Institutions.
When you have thousands of students at your institution, choosing who to recruit to represent your university can be challenging. It’s vital to ensure your ambassadors are from a variety of backgrounds, and study a range of subjects, so they can happily chat to different prospects. Having ambassadors from different years of study is also important so prospects can hear from students at different stages of their education.
Promotion
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Social media: this has a wide reach across the university community and is great for getting the word out that you're looking for a broad range of students interested in representing the university and building their own employability skills.
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A stand at the Freshers' Fair: again, this is a great way to reach a huge portion of the community, especially first years who will be very well placed to engage with prospects making their university decision.
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Speak to academics: ask for recommendations of students who will represent their course or subject area well.
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Send an email campaign to specific groups to advertise the opportunity to represent their course or faculty.
You may like to create an application form, or ask for a CV and covering letter. Ensure you find out about the student, what course they're studying, and, crucially, why they want to be an ambassador.
When selecting who you'd like to join your student ambassador team, run some interviews, in person or on the phone, to find out more about:
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Why they'd like to be a student ambassador (are they passionate about the institution?)
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What they want to gain from the experience
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What their current skill set is (why do they think they'd make a good student ambassador?)
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Their confidence, interests, strengths and weaknesses and how this opportunity will help them.
Every ambassador program should be built to support students and develop their skills.
Content creation
For student ambassador schemes focused on content creation, the same suggestions apply for getting the word out there. In addition to the application steps above, you may like to ask students to demonstrate specific examples of how they work with content and social media. A couple of examples include:
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Social media planning: ask your students to create a content schedule for a university campaign and explore the different ways it can be promoted.
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Content creation: getting your students to work independently to create their own content package can test their digital literacy and creativity, and allows them to showcase their skills.
Check out our other articles on Incentivizing Student Ambassadors and Training Student Ambassadors. Please get in touch if you have any questions.