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Media Contact: Brandon Lausch, 215-204-4115, blausch@temple.edu
As the human resources field becomes increasingly specialized, the Fox School of Business and its students are leading the way. This spring, the Fox School’s Department of Human Resource Management (HRM) launched a College-to-Career program to train its majors for jobs in talent sourcing and recruiting – emerging areas that leading executives say are an important industry entry point for recent graduates.
The new HRM College-to-Career program partners with Philadelphia-area employers to provide specialized training to students who have high GPAs and have demonstrated the ability to effectively manage people. This training focuses on sourcing talent, the recruiting process, and the legal and privacy issues in those areas, and also on understanding HR metrics – how data about employees drives decision-making in modern organizations. Promising students are recruited by the HRM Department during their junior year, and faculty recommendations support the application and selection process.
HRM instructor Katherine Nelson and adjunct faculty member Mike Guglielmo developed the program after meeting with industry executives at the Fox School’s HR Roundtable, where they heard again and again that one of the fastest-growing areas of the human resources industry is talent sourcing. The HR Roundtable is comprised of HR executives from local organizations. Roundtable members meet regularly during the year with HR faculty to advise on curriculum issues, jobs and more.
The College-to-Career program includes an online course taught by Shally Steckerl, a national recruiting and talent-sourcing expert who has trained hundreds of human resource teams including those at General Electric, Google, Lockheed Martin, Cisco and Motorola. The program also includes an HR metrics course taught by Guglielmo, who besides being a Fox alumnus and an adjunct professor, is also vice president of talent acquisition and development at Genesis HealthCare. These courses and additional training delivered through self-study modules prepare students to compete for internships and jobs in the growing field of talent sourcing and recruiting.
“The whole point is to provide some additional education and training to our majors so that they have the skills to hit the ground running in one of those jobs,” Nelson said.
To design the program, Guglielmo and Nelson have partnered with a variety of industries, ranging from healthcare systems to manufacturing companies and from financial firms to food companies. These companies have expressed great interest in hiring students with these skills, and a number of them have already hired students from the program.
For human resource management majors, focusing on talent sourcing and recruiting provides a competitive edge because they are emerging areas within the industry, Guglielmo said.
“Recruiting has been around forever, but talent sourcing is really new. It uses technology like LinkedIn and Facebook as well as sophisticated Google searches to identify and track high-performing talent, and frankly many seasoned recruiters may not have those skills. Our students, with their interest and skills in technology, are naturals to compete for these jobs,” he said.
Another advantage of the program is that it helps the HRM Department and its students build and strengthen partnerships with area businesses.
“We want any employer who is thinking of hiring any HR major to think of Fox,” Nelson said.
While it is a difficult time for entry-level job seekers in many industries, Nelson said she is confident in Fox graduates and that the College-to-Career program is a proactive approach that will help Fox HRM majors stay ahead of industry trends.
“The placement numbers through CSPD are incredible,” Nelson said, referencing the 91 percent placement rate of graduating seniors who utilized resources from Fox’s Center for Student Professional Development. “I think we do a really good job right now of preparing students, but I think that providing this additional training will do even more to help our HR majors get jobs in the HR field.”
