Diversity Scholarship/Graduate Recruitment
Running a scholarship is a great way to attract potential new recruits to your company. You can target the scholarship to a specific subject or university or widen the eligibility to achieve a greater reach. You can also encourage diversity within your company by addressing under-representation. You could include a work placement as part of the programme to really test out your prospective employees before committing or to train them in your company’s practices and ethos. Scholarships can be an ideal and cost effective graduate recruitment funnel.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Positioning the company as valuing education, investing in the community and increasing access to higher education for disadvantaged groups, a scholarship could be used to enhance a company’s profile as part of their corporate social responsibility programme.
Employee Benefit
Scholarships could be offered as an employee benefit, either to the children or relatives of employees, or to the employees themselves if they wished to undertake additional training or study. This can also position the company as an organisation which values education and training and could attract potential employees.
Promotional/marketing led
You may wish to offer a scholarship to achieve specific marketing objectives. This is particularly relevant if your company’s target audience is either students or their parents, as the scholarship can be used to attract potential customers and raise awareness of your business and products.
Geographic
A company wishing to invest in their local area and support their local community may consider offering a scholarship to people from their local area. This could either be aimed at people who are resident or have been educated locally, or for use at the nearest University, encouraging students from further afield to come to the region. It could even prove a useful tool for regional tourist or development organisations to promote their area.
Subject specific
The huge range of courses available to study at University means that companies could possibly offer subject specific scholarships which are relevant to their business operations. An oil company offering Engineering scholarships or a Law firm offering Law scholarships can also mean that the company can build relationships with their scholars and have a future source of high quality employees.
Academic merit
By offering a scholarship based on Academic merit, companies could attract high quality applicants who are non subject specific and a potential source of high calibre graduates in the future.
Sporting or Musical achievement
If you would like to associate your brand with encouraging musical talent or sporting achievement, offer a scholarship to those students who show outstanding achievement, allowing them to develop their skills at the same time as studying for a degree.
Competitive
You could use a scholarship to create a competition which encourages particular activities, such as signing up to your database or liking your company profile on Facebook to enter. Competitions could also be used to identify particular talent, such as film makers or writers.
