Why Land O’Lakes Is a University Recruiting Powerhouse

The Challenge

Land O’Lakes is no stranger to growth. The Fortune 250 agriculture, manufacturing, and technology giant that began as a farmer-owned co-op now exceeds 9,000 workers across the United States and 60 countries around the world.

Committed to advancing technology to solve critical food challenges, Land O’Lakes needs the right people in the right roles to work as efficiently and effectively as possible. But when it comes to sourcing talent, they often rely on an area that presents its own set of challenges: university recruiting.

“Our college processes are constantly evolving, and we need to move quickly,” said Jenny Friedman, Talent Acquisition Manager at Land O’Lakes. “The team is often innovating in season, but instead of being able to efficiently adjust in the moment, we were finding barriers to execute on our ideas because of manual, time-consuming content creation, tracking, and follow-up processes. Without being able to leverage technology, we were also creating additional manual work to understand the effectiveness of our initiatives,” she explained.

Three of their biggest pain points?

• Delivering consistent, impactful marketing materials

• Building relationships in a virtual and post-pandemic environment required the team to innovate. “We needed to ensure we were building, nurturing, and engaging our early talent pipeline throughout their experience with us,” shared Friedman.

• Capturing and capitalizing on candidate data (skills, experience, graduation year, and location) to ease the work of recruiters, talent marketers and hiring teams

Without an integrated solution to seamlessly connect all of those dots, hiring well over a hundred interns as well as new grads was a heavy lift.

The Solution

As a Phenom customer, Land O’Lakes was already using multiple aspects of the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform, so it made sense to unlock the power of Phenom University Recruiting to accomplish their top goals:

• Eliminate manual recruiting processes

• Replace printed marketing materials with dynamic, easily editable content

• Streamline all talent marketing email campaigns and events

• Increase the recruiting lifespan of early talent

Here's how the solution is impacting vital aspects of their strategy:

1. Virtual Events
   “During the pandemic, students didn’t have a great opportunity to get to know us,” explained Andrea Wolf, College Relations Recruiter at Land O’Lakes. “It was paramount for us to figure out how to show up virtually and get students to connect to our culture. We wanted to meet the students where they’re at so they could see where they might fit here.” With University Recruiting, the Land O’Lakes team can easily build, schedule, market, and track online recruiting or “value-add” events with dedicated landing and registration pages on their Phenom Career Site.
   

2. On-site Events
   For in-person events, Phenom’s convenient mobile app helps the team register attendees, take photos of resumes, and leave feedback notes. Its integration with the Phenom CRM simplifies the ability to record, store, and quickly access student information, eliminating the need to track down students’ information in person. “Important information gets to hiring managers and decision makers even faster this way,” shared Friedman. “Immediately having access to those top leads from events is a capability we never had before."
   

3. Campaigns
   When building events, the team leverages Phenom Campaigns to connect with students before each event via email or SMS. “We think about how we can help attendees make the most of the event,” Friedman said. “Before Phenom, we couldn’t capture a personal experience with candidates,” Wolf added. “Now, we can connect in a really relevant way before, during, and after an event with targeted segmentation. Even if we don’t align with their interest right away, we can store their info within Phenom to nurture them later,” Wolf explained. Through automated watchlists and touch points, the team sends hyper-personalized communication to candidates during all four years of undergrad and beyond.
   
   Phenom SMS allows the team to be more intentional in how they reach students selected for interviews, as well as keep students who accept offers engaged — especially considering the extended timeframe between offer to start date. “We’ve replaced manual email and phone check-ins with a wonderful ecosystem,” said Friedman
   

4. Career Site Analytics
   Attracting and cultivating a talent community for their recruiters is also part of the job, shared Wolf. With their Career Site, Phenom CRM, and Phenom Talent Analytics the team finally has the ability to easily share all their early talent resources — and track what’s working. “We envisioned how many layers it would take to get to the important content before we started losing students,” she explained. “We also looked at where students were clicking, so we could better organize the content and get more visibility.”
   
   “Being able to monitor page traffic led to a lot of “aha” moments,” noted Friedman. “Before, there was little for candidates to engage with besides a list of current job openings. Now we can be much more thoughtful in the type of content we provide based on what candidates want.
   

5. Video Content
   Land O’Lakes also began replacing printed marketing materials with engaging video content for all recruiting programs in both undergrad and MBA spaces. The videos — a balance between self-recorded and high-production content — feature a variety of talent at the company discussing everything from what Land O’Lakes looks for in interns to helpful day-in-the-life overviews.

The Future

As the Land O’Lakes recruiting team looks to the future, a main objective is to maximize the data provided by Talent Analytics. Friedman’s goal is to measure social media interactions that drive people to visit and engage on their career site to verify anecdotal evidence about content performance from the marketing team.

Similarly, Wolf wants to dive deeper into email campaign analytics to see what actions students are taking after reading a particular promotional email. For example, did a student attend an event that was advertised in a message or apply to an internship that was listed? That chain of events is what Wolf wants to observe.

“Phenom’s ability to help us promote our company to students, educate them about our brand, and then see engagement data and insights is so valuable. It makes all of our hard work worth it,” she concluded.

The Results

Phenom has helped Land O’Lakes expand and optimize the length of their candidate nurturing process and eliminate expensive manual aspects of that process with outside agencies. “Annually, we were spending about $10,000 in print costs or creative development fees on fliers alone,” estimated Friedman. “Moving all student content onto our career site — and almost completely eliminating our use of print materials in career fair booths — has been a huge budget and time saver. We’re now able to update program content in seconds, as opposed to weeks.”

Not to mention the thousands of recruiter hours saved on admin work like candidate data entry. “When you’re working with spreadsheets versus the tech Phenom provides, the difference is night and day. It’s above and beyond.” “It also gives us the opportunity to get above the funnel,” Friedman relayed. “We can market to students, schools, and clubs, and collect critical data before we’re even on site.”

Armed with real-time data, Friedman and Wolf are able to prove that the right content for students and early talent leads to better engagement. “We can see that our student content pages are consistently among our most popular pages,” Friedman noted. “We drove 6,000 page views in just three months and were easily able to add program videos, which student candidates had been asking for.”

Campaigns are another source of success for the team: “The emails in our always-on drip campaign for students consistently gets a +50% open rate, providing us another way to nurture leads on their journey to an application,” said Friedman. More intentional campaigns to smaller audiences — such as students who’ve accepted jobs with Land O’Lakes — are performing even higher. In fact, their last round of new hire emails had a 100% open rate while their college relations newsletter to the same audience achieved a 90% open rate.