If you sit in the Director of Admissions seat, or the VP EM seat, or even the Provost or Presidential seat, you probably get a lot of solicitations from people who want to help you with your recruiting challenges. They will often assure you they’re not selling anything, but just want to hear about your recruiting challenges. Sometimes these recruiting challenges take on different names, but for every recruiting challenge, there is, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, a solution that’s quick, easy, and wrong.

You’ll hear that your success will be brought about by changing the idea of the recruitment funnel, abandoning old ways of thinking about things like high school visits, discarding services like Student Search, and creating online communities where students feel welcomed.

None of these is completely wrong, of course, but all lack both context (a big theme on the blog, as you know if you’re a regular reader) as well as another critical component necessary to recruitment success. It’s something so simple and so easy, you’ve probably overlooked it.

The best admission recruiters know what this is; they know it so well, in fact, they might not even be able to articulate it. And unlike the expensive services companies want to sell you to help you overcome your recruiting challenges, it’s free to acquire and very cheap to implement (although I admit it can’t always be taught, which is another issue altogether.)

Ready?

It’s empathy.

The first, and most fundamental challenge in recruiting students is developing your sense of empathy; that is, putting yourself in the place of the students in the market, gaining insight into what they don’t know, and helping to bridge that gap. It’s probably not a coincidence that the work of a good admissions recruiter is like the work of a teacher: Figure out what your audience doesn’t know, and help them learn.

Sometimes, you can conduct market research to help find out what your markets don’t know, or where there is a gap between perception and reality, but for many colleges, you don’t need that as a first step.

You can look at your website with the fresh eyes of someone who knows nothing about your institution, while tearing apart every line of text, inspecting every photo, and tracing your steps trying to find answers to simple questions, as though you were a prospective student. Consider the advice Hannibal Lecter gave Clarice in Silence of the Lambs: “First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask, “What is it in itself? What is its nature?” These, by the way, are not questions for committees. They’re opportunities for experts in empathy.

You can look at your social content: Is it mostly you bragging about some university accomplishment? Are you just shouting it into the abyss, hoping someone who is interested hears it? Does that beautiful photo of the quad on an autumn day send a message of placidity, or loneliness? Does it respond to fill a genuine need? Is it what you intended?

You can look at your emails and your admission letters. If you include something as simple as, “if you have not yet visited our lovely campus…” you’ve already dropped the ball. Students expect you to know if they’ve visited your lovely campus, and to respond: Being empathetic means you recognize those prior visitors and non-visitors have different experiences, needs, and expectations of you. Too many communications start as form letters designed to cover all the bases of all 50,000 inquiries in your Slate instance, and get converted afterwards to include “customizations.” Flip that process by writing a letter to a single student first, and then making into a larger communication. Or several communications.

Maybe you’re pretty sure you’re doing a good job of this. Look anyway. And if you’ve done all you can, then talk to the people selling services to help fix your recruiting challenges. Because overlaying a good approach on a bad foundation is not going to be the fix you thought it was.

I can’t tell you how hard it is to convince people that admissions work is not sales. Admissions and recruitment staff use their empathy to help understand what the student wants, what the student needs, and what the student doesn’t know, while working to bridge that gap, or at least to narrow it. I recently bought a new car, and not one salesperson would have told me, “this is not the right car for you.” Good admissions and recruitment staff do that all the time. As they should.

Because that’s the problem with empathy.