Excellent general advice. As I've been leading our area's recruiting efforts for engineers (chem eng'g mostly) from Rutgers for 10+ years and am part of our overall recruiting team, which oversees recruiting for engineers for our division (we almost exclusively hire engineers), I can add a few comments.
First, as others have said, RU's Career Services group is not the best, although they're better than they were when I started. They're decent at helping companies set up for major events, like job fairs with dozens of companies, which involves setting up booths and getting the word out to a large group of students, such as all engineering students or all students, in general.
However, in my experience, they're not so great at working with individual departments, which is why I quickly went the route of working directly with the chairs/student advisors from a couple of key departments, including the chem/biochem eng'g dept., which I happened to get my 3 degrees from, which helped from the perspective that I knew some of the faculty still. I've found we get much more bang for our buck by working with specific departments than from the big career fairs.
Each year I/we do the following, which I think has been instrumental in us getting 2-3 strong interns every year and hiring at least 1 full-time engineer each year (sometimes 2, but also sometimes none - interest has to be mutual). This may be much more info than you're looking for, but the bullets below are already written up, so it was easy for me to cut/paste and edit lightly.
- Our HR group posts all the prerequisites for any internships/full-time positions on the Company website (I'm not involved with that other than approving the language for the job responsibilities part)
- I draft an email to the department's students introducing us, outlining our recruiting plan, including inviting them to an info night, providing details on how to sign up on the website and soliciting students to send me resumes if interested in either internships (limited to current juniors) or full-time positions (graduating seniors or grad students); since we can afford to be a bit picky, I make it clear that a 3.2 GPA is the minimum.
- We then hold our info night, which consists of myself and 3-4 other employees in our division (all RU grads who are good speakers and will engage with the students) speaking about what we do in the various departments in our division. We try to keep it interactive and have 30 minutes at the end for mingling and one on one questions. We also provide lots of food and beverages (pizzas, subs, salads, etc - we use Gerlanda's from the Busch Student Center), which always goes over well.
- Within a week or two, I'll usually receive 20-30 resumes and will then sit down with a couple of faculty members to compare my ranking of them and their input, since they know the students better than I do. I also ask them if there are any really good students we "missed" and if it's worth a personal appeal to them. They're also helpful in identifying any top diversity candidates.
- I then select maybe 10 juniors to interview for our 2-3 intern positions, which I have complete decision rights on. I then interview them and make my selections and hopefully they accept the offers (we get ~75% acceptance rates for internships). Since our Company is typically looking for 2-3 per school (we recruit heavily at about 10-15 top chem/biochem eng'g schools, including RU), if I get a rejection, I can usually offer the next best person if I think that next person is really strong.
- I will also interview about 4-5 seniors per full-time job interviewee we want (that number varies every year from 0 to 2 or 3). I don't have decision rights there and my role is to identify candidates to bring in to the various departments for full-day site interviews. Once I've identified any of those candidates, it's out of my hands, as the specific departments take over the interview/hiring process.
- My one additional comment is that if I don't think someone can cut it, I won't pursue them any further. I've seen people make comments over the years about hiring an RU person because they went to RU. I would never do that, since any hire is a reflection on me and full-time positions, in particular, are pretty precious, such that "wasting" one on an unqualified candidate is probably a quick way to get oneself out of the recruiting business.
