At ISE’s Recruitment Conference Brian Sinclair from Aon shared why he believes the future of early careers attraction is increasingly in-house. He shares how they are designing high-impact experiences that students really value.
For most of my career in early careers, the playbook barely changed: book the courier to deliver the stand and the merch, travel to a campus fair, and hope the right students walk past. It worked - until it didn't.
Talk to students today and the picture is different. They aren't short of touchpoints - they're drowning in them. Overflowing inboxes, back-to-back virtual events and a steady drip of rejections (if they even get them) have left many craving something far rarer: a genuine, human, face-to-face conversation with an employer.
Meanwhile, those of us running early-talent programmes are squeezed from the other side. From tighter travel budgets, louder demands to prove ROI, and the growing reality of AI in the process.
For years we worried about talent shortages. Honestly, that's not what keeps me up at night anymore. The real challenge is finding genuine potential amid unprecedented 'noise'. On some of our programmes that means sifting on average c250 applications for every single role.
So, I started asking a different question: what if our best engagement didn't happen on campus at all?
Over the last few cycles my team rebuilt our approach around one idea - high-impact, in-house experiences that students actually value.
Designing high impact experiences
We use a simple ease-vs-impact matrix to help us map out how easily can we set something up and deliver it, versus the brand awareness, engagement and applications it generates.
Traditional fairs are easy but low-impact. Employer-hosted events take real effort - but they punch far above their weight.
From that, four formats have stood out for us. For the conference-style and niche events it works to encourage attendees to post on LinkedIn, maximising event exposure:
- Conference-style events - we invite 100-150 students in for a day of industry insight, expert-led sessions and structured networking. The highest-rated element is rarely the workshops; it's the lunch and the open networking because that's where the best human connections are made.
- Niche, skills-based events - a themed challenge day. Ours are built around maths and problem-solving to attract candidates for our actuarial type roles. They are deliberately timed to campus survey periods to build commercial awareness and make our brand memorable for the right reasons. This is more about the basic ABCs - Awareness, Branding and Connection – rather than direct applications as we have typically closed when we run this session
- 'Event-in-a-box'- a repeatable kit our local volunteers run across multiple offices, supporting social mobility and reaching around 1,000 students a year in schools and colleges. Same content and same timetable in different locations. Attracting local talent for local jobs.
- University careers-service insight days - we understand the need to strengthen connections with career influencers, so we bring in careers professionals from around 40 UK universities. They go behind the scenes with our recruitment data, people-manager panels and graduate voices.
Do they work?
The honest test was the data, and it held up. Nearly a quarter of the candidates we invited to an assessment centre had attended an in-house event, and 14% of all our offers came through that route. 84% of attendees rated the events five out of five, and at roughly £75 per candidate the ROI is hard to argue with.
I'm particularly proud that these events widened the funnel rather than narrowing it: over half of attendees were female and 57% came from ethnic-minority backgrounds. Well-designed events can make attraction more inclusive, not less.
Recommendations
If there's a formula, mine is three words: Food, fun and follow-up.
Don't charge, and do cover reasonable expenses. Open it to all, but set clear entry criteria. Be explicit that it isn't an assessment centre. Open with an icebreaker, get a genuine range of colleagues into the room, reinforce the positives rather than calling out the negatives, and follow up on every referral.
And one hard-won lesson: don't run a live quiz - use a tool built for it!
An improvement for next year will be to end an event on a high. Ideally a final, positive summary that adds momentum to you and call(s) to action.
On the ubiquitous AI question? I don't think it changes the core task. Technology will keep filtering and screening at scale, and that's fine. But finding talented people and helping them grow into exceptional professionals is still deeply human work. Tech filters talent - but people still hire people.
The real shift I've made isn't from campus to office. It's from volume to value. Signing up is not the same as showing up, and every application represents effort that deserves engagement. When you host, invite and genuinely welcome students in, you close the gap between good candidates, good recruiters and great hires.
Overall, what I took away from designing these events is that meaningful beats mass every time. Campus fairs will always have their place, but the employers investing in genuine, well-run, in-house experiences are the ones building trust, widening access and turning interest into hires.
Get the fundamentals right and you don't just fill roles - you give students an experience worth showing up for.