3 Key Strategies for Recruiting Stealth Applicants
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, “stealth applicants” are prospective students who applied to your school whom you didn’t know about beforehand. They didn’t ask for information ahead of time or schedule a campus visit. According to Ruffalo Noel Levitz, one in three applicants at private schools and one in five applicants at public schools are stealth applicants. As a result, they make up a significant percentage of overall college applicants each year.
While it’s ideal for any marketing and admissions office to have full knowledge of all potential applicants beforehand, having a decent number of stealth applicants is not a bad thing. There will always be prospective students who are autonomous and self-driven—those who prefer to do their research on their own and fly under the radar. With that said, there are still things you can do to help recruit them:
Answer These Four Critical Questions—Clearly—on Your Website
For those who aren’t being engaged by your other marketing channels (emails, campus visits, counselor communications, etc.), your website is essentially their sole “admissions counselor.” That’s why a really good website can actually result in more stealth applicants since it means the website is providing everything they need to know (reducing their incentive to reach out to the school).
To that end, make sure your website is clearly and effectively answering these four critical questions:
Do you have my major?
How do I apply (and, to a lesser extent, Will I get in)?
Will I be happy being part of this community?
Students should be able to navigate your website to find answers to these questions with ease. Ideally, your menu structure should essentially reflect these questions. And there are numerous ways to address them, including:
blog articles
videos
interactive program pages
interactive program (or future career) finders
Biola University makes their programs front and center on their website and provides a sharp, easy-to-navigate program page for students. Students can easily click on the area of study to see what majors and minors are available and then dig further to view well-designed pages with detailed course information and videos.
Or, check out this interactive "Major Quiz" from Loyola University of Chicago to help guide students as they consider what programs they might be interested in based on their interests and talents. With a robust quiz like this, you can help uncertain students get a better sense of what they might like to do—all without having to talk to a single person (even though you should continue to provide clear paths get in touch). Plus, if they find something like this helpful, it’s likely they’ll share it with their friends and peers also considering schools.
Use Analytics to Unveil Stealth Behavior
Website analytics can help you actually see what’s happening on your website. And getting a general sense of whether your homepage is actually spurring visitors to click on your menu items or if they are bouncing immediately from your tuition page (instead of digging into available aid) is crucial.
By investing in certain technology, you can actually identify visitors through IP addresses and track whether they ultimately apply or not. If they haven’t submitted any information beforehand, then you’ll know they are stealth applicants and be able to review their navigation and interaction habits on your website.
Since analytics can also provide you with valuable information about where your visitors are coming from, you may decide to use geo-targeted content modules on your website to provide customized and compelling information to certain visitors. For example, you may decide to highlight certain content to an out-of-state stealth visitor (e.g. you may opt to feature financial aid and scholarship info because of the higher costs) and alternate content to an in-state one (e.g. you may opt to highlight a campus visit since that might be more feasible for them).
Aside from Google Analytics, an analytics service like Hotjar can provide even more nuanced information about what your visitors are doing: you can record live sessions on your website, view a heat map to see which areas of the page are most popular, identify which CTAs are being clicked on, and so on.
Contact Stealth Applicants Yourself
Plan a strategy for identifying stealth applicants after they’ve applied and reach out to them to see if they would be willing to complete a short survey or, even better, be open to a user interview over the phone. With as few as eight or ten phone interviews, you can learn a tremendous amount of insight.
It’s important, though, to ensure you’re asking them the right questions. The goal should be to have them walk you through their college search and admissions process. How did they first hear about your school? What aspects of your website (and other schools’ websites) did they consult? How often? Did they rely on advice from counselors, parents, friends, or others?
In other words, the goal isn’t merely to find out why they applied to your school. Rather, it’s to identify the common user journeys for stealth applicants. With this in hand, you can then update your website pages, re-consider your social media strategy, adjust SEO, and so on.
For example, you may find a lot of stealth applicants actually reach out to current students directly on social media. If so, perhaps you can promote this type of engagement more visibly on your website and university-owned social media accounts?
Plus, you may find that some stealth applicants actually did reach out to your school, just not through admissions or marketing. Perhaps they reached out to faculty or departmental staff? If so, it would be helpful to know this, since you could develop a strategy for collaborating with other campus stakeholders to keep you informed on such interactions.
Such a strategy may allow you to turn more stealth prospective students into known ones—enabling you to pull them into your robust recruiting strategies. Of course, this doesn’t mean you would start spamming them with emails because they reach out to a professor. But with some strategy and planning, you can at least invite them to engage with you more openly.
