Are you feeling pressure about not hitting your enrollment goals this year? Have you exhausted all...
You have plenty of new inquiries coming in. But your team can’t keep up with responding to every single one. They have to pick and choose (sometimes at random) because there isn’t enough time in the day to reach out to every prospective student.
This is more common than you think. When we consult with admissions leaders, one of the biggest frustrations we hear is, “There is so much chaos going on with our leads that I just know we are leaving potential enrollments on the wayside.”
Often, the proposed solution to this problem is hiring a new Admissions Counselor. Adding more resources should lighten everyone's load, right? However, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, we recommend different options to our clients, depending on their unique situation.
So, what are your options for addressing the bandwidth challenges in your admissions department? And how do you know the best solution for your institution?
In this article, we’ll discuss the three most common options for improving the effectiveness of an admissions department:
- Hire a new team member
- Optimize your current team’s bandwidth
- Outsource some work to an enrollment management partner
Throughout, you will learn about each option and the situation in which each tends to be the best choice. After reading, you’ll have more clarity about the best way to tackle the bandwidth challenges your team is facing so they can get back to doing what they do best - connecting with prospective students!
Option 1: Increase Resources by Hiring a New Admissions Counselor
Whether you have more leads than your team can handle or have recently experienced staff turnover, hiring another team member may be a viable option.
A new staff member can be an excellent long-term investment who will gain a deep understanding of your institution and can grow to take on more responsibilities.
If you set them up for success with the proper role and clear expectations on key metrics like the number of calls per day and how quickly they contact every lead, you could see a positive influence on your team’s capacity.
Over time, they could even act as a resource to help onboard future team members.
However, adding more full-time employees doesn’t automatically translate to increased performance and clarity on what will move the needle.
Hiring a new employee involves recruitment costs, salary, benefits, and training expenses. This, coupled with the time it takes to hire and onboard a new employee, means it could be a significantly long time before you see results in your enrollment numbers.
Before you start the recruiting process and commit to bringing someone else on board, it’s crucial to consider whether it will solve your bandwidth issues or just add to the chaos.
When Does It Make Sense to Hire a New Team Member?
In our experience, admissions departments that successfully address bandwidth issues by hiring a new team member have these characteristics in common:
- A clear job description with expectations that align with your institution's and students' changing needs, including speed-to-lead, cold calling, etc.
- Standard processes that can scale as leads increase or the team grows
- Performance management metrics are automatically reported (or easy to track)
- Admissions team turnover isn’t a challenge or a frequent occurrence
- Flexibility to wait for the time it takes to recruit, hire, and onboard a new admissions counselor
If your team lacks clarity on their roles and responsibilities, or you’re unsure which processes or strategies need to be adjusted, now may not be the right time to hire a new Admissions Counselor.
Doing so before you’re ready is a high-risk move, especially if your department has a history of burnout or turnover. If the new hire or another team member leaves your institution, it could exacerbate the current instability and require the hiring process to start over.
Instead, you should consider optimizing your existing team’s roles and processes or working with an outsourced admissions partner.
Option 2: Optimize the Bandwidth of Your Existing Admissions Team
Today’s student expectations and communication preferences change faster than ever before.
Many prospective students prefer to receive text messages over email, and on average need to be contacted more than seven times before they are ready to commit to a meeting with a counselor.
Unfortunately, many admissions strategies and roles haven’t adapted to keep up.
That’s why reviewing and optimizing your current resources is crucial before hiring additional team members!
The path toward optimizing your team’s bandwidth occurs in three stages:
- Audit and analyze current performance to identify the most significant opportunities for improvement. When analyzing, look at performance metrics such as admissions funnel conversion rates, contact rates, and speed-to-lead. You’ll also want to evaluate how well you leverage your CRM's capabilities and integrated technologies.
- Prioritize and develop strategies to address the most immediate issues. A great way to decide on prioritization is to compare your conversion rates to industry benchmarks for each stage in the funnel, then focus on the spot with the most significant opportunity for improvement. Strategies to implement will vary depending on your core focus and may include updating your admissions outreach processes, adopting new technologies, or adjusting existing roles and accountabilities.
- Implement the changes according to the order of priority. Start with one key area and execute your plan. Then, build momentum over time by optimizing additional areas. After implementation, regularly review the results to confirm what was successful and what needs to be further optimized.
Keep in mind that someone within your institution must be responsible for this optimization work to ensure changes are implemented quickly and effectively.
This person needs to manage not only the strategy and implementation - they will need to help the team adjust and adapt to what’s changing. If the changes and reason behind them aren’t clearly articulated to show how they will help your team be more successful, your team’s overwhelm could increase.
When Does it Make Sense to Optimize Resources with Your Existing Team?
We would recommend the route of internal optimization to admissions teams that:
- Can commit internal resources to complete an unbiased audit and analysis of admissions performance metrics
- Understand how their current technology can be better utilized to improve effectiveness and efficiency
- Are willing to adapt to new expectations and accountabilities within existing roles
- Have the flexibility to wait a longer time to see a positive impact on enrollment numbers
Ultimately, internally optimizing your admissions team’s bandwidth heavily depends on how open your team is to change.
In the best-case scenario, your team will welcome the adjustments and feel empowered to grow. On the other hand, some individuals may be resistant and feel uneasy about changes to their roles and daily expectations.
If your team lacks the capacity (or willingness) to make many changes quickly, consider outsourcing part of your admissions work.
Option 3: Outsource Part of Your Admissions Work to an Enrollment Management Partner
Many higher education institutions see great success when partnering with an outsourced vendor to address their admissions needs. Options include admissions marketing agencies, contact center service providers, and larger enrollment management partners.
When being overwhelmed is the most prominent issue for your team, hiring a contact center service provider is typically the best type of vendor to choose from.
Higher ed contact centers often have specialized knowledge and experience in admissions outreach processes and campaigns that have been optimized over years of working with institutions.
They can also usually start work in a few weeks, reducing the ramp-up time to increase your enrollment numbers more quickly. This can be increased further if your outsourced admissions partner implements an aged lead campaign to get you a quick burst of tuition revenue!
Keep in mind that the quality of service can vary between vendors, making it crucial to spend the time vetting each option. (Read this article for tips on getting it right: 6 Considerations for Choosing a Higher Ed Call Center)
Is Hiring an Outsourced Admissions Partner Right for Your Institution?
Working with a higher education admissions partner can be a valuable investment for institutions that:
- Want to focus on interested, pre-qualified leads instead of chasing down every new prospective student
- Have an admissions leader who knows how to coach and hold the team accountable
- Has supporting technology that integrates with the vendor’s system
- Needs to address bandwidth concerns more immediately
If after auditing your admissions performance, you learn that your counselors have competitive contact, engagement, and lead-to-enrollment rates, partnering with a contact center may not be the right fit.
Additionally, if you don’t have a leader who can collaborate with the contact center and cannot commit to an agreement for at least 6 months, hiring a vendor isn’t a viable option right now.
Disclaimer: Sometimes the Right Choice is Doing Nothing (For Now)
While this may not seem like a strategy to address your challenges, in certain circumstances, we may recommend that an institution keep the same structure and processes in its admissions team for the short term.
Choosing to do nothing can be an appropriate decision if you are biding your time during a leadership change, such as a new president coming into your institution.
However, it’s crucial to understand the negative impact this choice could have on your team and institution.
For example, if marketing consistently provides new leads, but your team isn’t adjusting strategies or making plans to increase bandwidth to convert those leads, you’ll create even more dysfunction between the teams.
Additionally, waiting to address your problems isn’t sustainable. If you wait too long, uncertainty will persist, overwhelm will increase, and you’ll continue missing enrollment targets.
Because of these downsides, we only recommend temporarily doing nothing to leaders who plan to reevaluate and implement one of the other options when the time is right.
It’s Time to Starting Growing Your Enrollment
In this article, you’ve explored the different options for addressing your team’s bandwidth to hit your conversion rate and enrollment goals. But if you’re like other admissions leaders, you may still feel overwhelmed about what to do. Most of the options above will require you to take the time to properly plan, research, and implement. This can leave you feeling like you will have to wait a long time to see the desired results.
The truth is, you can make impactful changes even before fully investing in one of the options above!
When consulting with higher education admissions leaders, we find that asking the right questions is key to quickly identifying an institution's most valuable opportunities.
Do you know the answers to these questions for your institution?
- Is your strategic enrollment management plan up to date?
- How is your admissions funnel performing compared to your competitors?
- How quickly is your team contacting new prospective students?
- Do your admissions conversations focus on the right things?
Explore our Enrollment Management Resource Library to learn why answering these questions is so important and discover the immediate opportunities you have for increasing student enrollment and refocusing your admissions team!
