Member Article

Prospects taps into Discord to connect recruiters with Gen Z

Graduate careers expert Prospects, part of Jisc, is launching the first Tech Careers Fair in the UK to be hosted on communications service Discord, addressing the generational gap between recruiters and people in their teens and early twenties.

The event will connect employers and educational institutions with hard-to-reach young talent interested in technology careers. Recruiters will meet students, advertise roles and courses and explain exactly what they are looking for, while students and graduates will find new opportunities and discover where their career could take them.

The Prospects Discord server, akin to a conference building, has been designed so that the experience is similar to what students would expect at a physical careers fair. Categories and channels act like smaller rooms, providing useful information as well as spaces for talking and meeting.

Users orientate themselves in the Start Here category where employers, careers advisors and mentors will be recognisable by a badge and a Roles channel helps employers and educators find out more about students.

Two main event stage channels use Discord’s large-scale voice and video format so that employers and educators can run talks with up to 10,000 people at once. They will also be able to host their own personalised channels where they can provide company information and run voice or text discussions about careers and roles.

The Student Community channels enable students to interact while careers advisers run a category on CV Help. Students will also be able to explore the full range of tech careers by talking to professionals working in roles from software development and UX design to cyber security and data analysis.

The server’s longevity means that it can continue to grow beyond the constraints of a timed event, providing students with a place to find resources and chat longer term.

The fair is free to attend and take part. Prospects is looking for employers who have a range of tech graduate and apprentice roles to fill each year as well as educational institutions that offer tech apprenticeship courses and undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. It is also seeking people who are already in tech careers or who are studying relevant courses to talk to students.

Discord emerged for gamers but its popularity exploded and it now has over 150 million monthly active users globally including Prospects’ target audience of around four million young people aged 16-23 in the UK.

Sarah Brookes, Marketing & Business Operations Director for Student Services at Jisc said: “While Discord is used to build brands it is rarely applied to recruitment. Every year employers are left with unfilled tech vacancies and one of the main challenges they face is many recruiters don’t use the same channels as people in their teens and early twenties. Discord is a hot platform for communicating with this hard-to-reach demographic and should provide ripe ground for reaching them.”

“Students are generally very comfortable when talking online and engagement increases when they don’t have to worry about being in front of a camera. The text heavy format of Discord provides an element of privacy perfect for meeting young people. The fair lasts for three hours so students have plenty of opportunity to move around and meet prospective employers.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Prospects .