POSTED BY Adrian Barrett

It’s a given now that every business school wants a diverse MBA class and is presumably recruiting across the world. The fall back thing that everybody does is to advertise. The problem with advertising of course is that people are becoming more worldly and cynical about adverts. Therefore, by comparison, PR is very powerful because it can tell stories and engage people, and has that third party seal of approval – it is not just you saying something, it’s a journalist writing about it. What type of content successfully improves student recruitment? What really works? The voice of the student from the particular country you are targeting, who has gone to your school and talks about what the experience was like for them. An interview with the person who upped sticks from the country in question and came to your school, completed the qualification and is now doing really well and has set up an interesting business. Yet some schools still fall into the trap of using unbelievable case studies that only show the positive aspects - where everything is “brilliant”. And it comes across as an advert. What is much more effective is the ‘warts and all’ picture, because life simply isn’t perfect.

There are various stakeholders within a target company with whom it might be appropriate to discuss the topic of business education. Those in the C-suite, for example, are likely to take an interest in the training of their managers and executives. However, for the purpose of this post we are specifically looking at what is possibly the key group of stakeholders – HR.