Setting Objectives

Reach involves building awareness of your services. It involves maximizing reach over time to create multiple interactions using different touch points; face-to-face, presentations, events, webinars, email, online assets, and social channels.

Reach involves generating interest, curiosity, and awareness of your services with prospective contacts in targeted organizations through personalized emails and phone calls and leveraging existing broad networks and ecosystems willing to share your content (newsletters or presentations) with their audiences.

Examples include: United Way promoting you in their newsletter; WorkBC is willing to include materials in their distribution networks; Camosun Development & Alumni will promote your events using their distribution list; SWPP funders are interested in doing collaborative presentations to employers; the CPHR association does guest panel presentations to.

Act is short for Interact. It is about persuading prospective employers to take the next step, the next Action on their journey after they initially have awareness. The aim is to generate quality interactions with the prospective employer contact(s) where you can help them better understand how various types of WIL can offer value to their organization. 

When a prospective employer partners with us through creating a WIL posting, participates in a mock interview or joins us at an event, it can be considered a conversion. The aim is to discover if WIL would be of benefit to the prospective employer.  

Engage refers to long-term relationship building and loyalty that is established through a mutually beneficial exchange of value. 

Promote your services, build awareness and populate the top level of the funnel. This can be achieved by increasing personalized contact with prospective and current employers and leveraging existing network channels (eg. Chamber of commerce) to distribute communications to wider audiences (online and offline). Online communications influence offline consultative conversions. 

It is a good idea to start with employers who can be considered low hanging fruit—in other words, reaching out to employers who have posted positions but never hired. 

Add value. HR staff, CEO’s, business owners, directors are busy people. They are not looking for random sales calls and pitches. They are looking forward to speaking with people who can solve their problems. Service delivery in this context is understanding what problems the person you are reaching out to has and how you can potentially help. Value is created through your consulting skills, an employer needs analysis, and solid working knowledge of student skill sets, student timelines, and funding.  

Offline service delivery includes answering prospective employers’ questions through an employer-centric website and LinkedIn page that delivers educational content and resources.

Speak – get closer to customers. You have to speak to employer contacts to acquire new partnerships. Speaking happens through actual connection but also through your content and resources. In a post-pandemic economy, your messaging’s effectiveness will depend on how well you articulate value to the employer instead of trying to achieve a job posting. 

Use your LinkedIn business page to create a two-way dialogue and increase your effectiveness of getting close to employer contacts. This will also enable you to reach a wider audience to build your employer network. 

Save – save costs and resources. Saving costs and time for the employer is achieved through decreasing confusion around how your WIL program works, clearly articulating timelines and student skill sets, using resources to inform and educate, making it easy by creating a system account and reducing the number of people they need to speak to in your department. 

Hiring a WIL student holds tremendous value not only for company recruiting purposes (recruit once, hire twice) but also if the employer leverages funding streams. This is especially important in a post-pandemic economy. If your online communication materials answer many of the prospect’s questions, you will significantly reduce the number of phone calls coming into your office (especially during peak periods). 

Sizzle – articulate your value proposition. This is achieved by aligning your unique value proposition with your service delivery. How effectively you communicate “what is in it for me” and “why” will determine how interested a potential partner is in working with you.