Get to Know Recruitment and Admissions
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the recruitment and admission processes and associated challenges.
- Summarize the purpose and benefits of Recruitment and Admissions in Education Cloud.
- Describe the primary Recruitment and Admissions features.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, consider completing this recommended content.
From Inquiry to Enrollment
A good first impression is the foundation for any strong relationship, and this holds true in educational settings. As prospective students weigh options to pursue their academic future, they explore institutions and programs to determine the best fit. How quickly a school responds to their questions, how clearly it presents its offerings, and how personalized the outreach feels can all shape whether a student moves forward or moves on to the next option.
To attract a strong and diverse pool of applicants, it’s important for institutions to build meaningful connections with prospective students early in their journey. That means tailoring their communications to the unique interests and goals of each learner and providing timely, personalized support.
Even after potential students decide to apply, the engagement doesn’t end there. They often need support through the application process, which involves a whirlwind of formalities.
Lapses in communication or delayed support can sow doubt and ultimately lead students to explore other options. Unfortunately, this outcome is all too common for many institutions due to several persistent challenges.
- Recruiters often lack the tools necessary to effectively promote their institution among prospective students, and quickly respond to large volumes of student inquiries.
- Admissions teams work with uncoordinated systems, which hinder their ability to forecast the admissions pipeline, efficiently manage application intake, and organize accurate and consistent application reviews across departments.
- Students are left frustrated by outdated interfaces, poor communication, and a lack of visibility into their application statuses.
When communication breaks down or systems fall short, institutions risk losing qualified applicants to schools with more responsive and intuitive experiences. Missed enrollment goals can mean fewer tuition dollars and less funding for academic programs.
It’s time to rethink how institutions approach outreach and admissions, from the first point of contact to the final enrollment decision. Luckily, Recruitment and Admissions in Education Cloud has everything you need to make a positive and lasting connection with your learners.
Recruitment and Admissions in Education Cloud
With Recruitment and Admissions, you can effectively recruit, engage, and admit prospective students to meet enrollment targets for each academic term and ensure continued growth. Through personalized experiences, automation, AI, and other features, recruiters can forecast and track enrollment opportunities, get a full 360-degree view of each prospect, and provide tailored communications and onboarding. Admissions teams can quickly collaborate across departments and use advanced tools to streamline application processing.
Take a closer look at how Recruitment and Admissions features set your institution up for success.
Applicant Portal
It all starts with the applicant portal—your comprehensive website for engaging students, fielding inquiries, and guiding the application process. This portal, powered by Experience Cloud, provides learners with helpful information about your institution’s programs and campus life. Learners can also request information and schedule appointments with faculty and staff.
In this image, a student searches for available programs on a college’s applicant portal.
When they're ready to apply, students can start their application directly through the portal. This screenshot shows all the required tasks that a student completes to submit their application and their overall progress.
Using dynamic applications, applicants can enter personal and academic information, upload documents, and request recommendation letters.
Recruitment and Admissions App
While students interact through the portal, staff manage their work in the Recruitment and Admissions App. From this centralized workspace, recruiters respond to inquiries, schedule meetings, nurture opportunities, launch marketing campaigns, and monitor the admissions pipeline. For admissions teams, the app supports application review assignments, task management, and collaboration across departments.
Inquiry Management
As students explore their options, questions naturally arise. With Inquiry Management, you can set up several types of forms on your applicant portal so that students can quickly submit inquiries, and connect with staff. Recruiters can organize incoming inquiries by category and automatically route them to relevant teams. For example, they can forward all questions related to dorm availability to the housing office. The number of inquiries you receive can also help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Student Recruitment Agent
To provide even faster support, the Student Recruitment Agent, an AI-powered virtual assistant, answers common questions around the clock. The agent generates answers to student questions related to your learning programs, support programs, application processes, campus, and other topics. You can deploy the agent across multiple channels, including your applicant portal, and configure the agent to automatically escalate inquiries requiring human intervention.
Opportunity Management
Behind the scenes, institutions use Opportunity Management to capture and track each student’s journey. Forecast, track, and manage prospective student engagement and measure the likelihood of their enrollment. Automatically create opportunity records for each learner who shows interest in a learning program. Assign them to recruiters for follow-up engagement, and keep track of their journey through your recruitment and admissions funnel. Use data-driven insights to gauge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and identify the academic programs that need increased engagement to meet enrollment goals.
Application Management
When a student is ready to apply, Education Cloud supports flexible, dynamic application forms built with reusable components. Students can complete tasks at their own pace, track their progress, and submit required materials, all through the portal.
Applicants can even request and collect recommendation letters directly from their application. Automated reminders encourage each recommender to submit their feedback ahead of important deadlines.
Application Reviews and Decisions
After students submit their applications, Education Cloud streamlines the review and decision process. It routes the applications to reviewers through the admissions console, where staff can collaboratively and consistently evaluate the submitted information using configurable rubrics.
This image of an application record includes the student’s submitted information and a rubric with criteria to guide admissions staff as they complete their reviews.
Together, these features give your institution a connected, flexible system to support students from their first questions to final admission decisions. Whether you're responding to inquiries, guiding applications, or reviewing submissions, Recruitment and Admissions in Education Cloud helps your team stay coordinated and responsive at every step.
Throughout this module, you follow Sophia, a high school senior exploring her college options. One school that’s grabbed her interest is Astro University, which uses Education Cloud to power its recruitment and admissions process. You see how the team at Astro U uses Recruitment and Admissions features to successfully attract, recruit, and enroll Sophia.
In this unit, you learned how Recruitment and Admissions in Education Cloud works to simplify engagement with prospective learners, accelerate application processes, and boost enrollment. In the next unit, learn how to manage inquiries and opportunities.