Learn About the Student Recruitment Agent
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the purpose of the Student Recruitment Agent.
- Explain how to set up the Student Recruitment Agent.
Enhance Student Engagement
As you’ve learned throughout this module, prospective students rely on recruitment teams and other staff to help them decide their academic journey, and on-time engagement is essential in maintaining the student’s interest. Lapses in communication or unanswered questions at this critical stage can upend your progress in attracting learners to your institution.
While Inquiry Management helps your institution manage and streamline information sharing and correspondence, your recruitment teams only have so many hours in a day. The number of inquiries that students submit can add up quickly—especially as the admissions deadline approaches. Add in time zone differences and employee absences, and fielding every inquiry can become unmanageable.
What if you could keep your engagement with students running around the clock and simultaneously reduce the burden on staff members? Enter the Student Recruitment Agent.
Student Recruitment Agent
The Student Recruitment Agent maximizes your institution’s engagement with candidates and leaves no question unanswered. Grounded in your knowledge article content, this AI-powered virtual agent can quickly provide essential information about your institution. It can even schedule campus tours and guide the learner through the application process.
For more nuanced questions that fall outside the knowledge base, the agent can automatically escalate the question to the relevant support executive.
With the help of this intelligent tool, you can support prospective learners at any time of day and reduce the burden on your staff.
Explore the types of assistance that the Student Recruitment Agent provides to students.
Schedule a Campus Tour
For starters, the agent can help students in attending campus tours. It does this by asking for the location and time that works best for the student and recommending a few scheduling options. Then, when the student selects a time slot, the agent launches a flow to enroll them in the tour.
Before Sophia applies to Astro U, she’d like to take a stroll around the campus to check out the dorms, dining options, sports facilities, and other aspects of campus life. On the applicant portal, she opens a chat with the Student Recruitment Agent and asks about campus tours.
The agent follows up by asking what dates work best for her visit, and then based on her response, lists the available campus tour time slots. Sophia selects her preferred time slot, and the agent quickly signs her up for the tour straight from the conversation.
Guide the Application Process
The Student Recruitment Agent also provides essential, on-demand support during the application process. It helps keep applicants on track with meeting submission requirements, reminds them of missing documents, and provides personalized suggestions on how to improve their application. It can even create the application record for the student based on important context, such as their intended academic program and term.
During the tour, Sophia decides that Astro U is just what she’s looking for, but she isn’t exactly sure where to start. So she opens a chat with the Student Recruitment Agent regarding the application process.
Sophia tells the agent that she’s interested in applying for the Environmental Studies undergraduate program.
After confirming with Sophia, the agent generates an application form for the program.
You explore Recruitment and Admissions application forms and processes more in depth later in this module.
Answer Questions
The Student Recruitment Agent can derive information from your knowledge articles and respond to all sorts of student questions. These questions can be about your institution, programs, and campus. With Agentforce Data Libraries, the Student Recruitment Agent can also answer questions from your file uploads and web sources.
As Sophia works through her application, a question comes up: she’s unsure how to submit transcripts from a community college where she’s taking a few courses over the summer. Once again, she opens a chat with the Student Recruitment Agent to get some help.
The agent not only responds with instructions on how to send over the transcripts, it also answers follow-up questions that Sophia has about transfer credits.
With the Student Recruitment Agent, learners have an always-on personal assistant to help them make well-informed decisions and complete the necessary steps to join your institution. Now, take a look at how you can set up this helpful AI colleague.
Student Recruitment Agent Setup
To configure the Student Recruitment Agent in your Salesforce org, start by enabling Einstein Generative AI for Education Cloud and Agentforce in Setup. Then, create knowledge articles covering the topics that prospective students commonly inquire about to ground the agent’s knowledge.
For example, here’s a knowledge article that includes information about the Environmental Studies program.
This article provides an overview of the program, key program features, admissions requirements, and other important information.
Over in the Agentforce Builder, the agent includes a default topic called Admissions and Enrollment FAQ, which uses the Answer Questions with Knowledge action to respond to students. Here’s a look at this topic in Agentforce Builder.
For best results, configure your knowledge articles so that they align with this default topic. Make sure to include articles about learning programs, support programs, application processes, and campus information. Alternatively, you can customize the default topic to correspond with the types of information in your existing articles that you want the agent to provide to students.
To protect sensitive data, make sure that your knowledge articles only contain public-facing information.
To redirect questions the agent can’t answer to a representative, create an escalation topic in the Agentforce Builder. To learn more, visit the Transfer Conversations from an Agent article in Salesforce Help.
After you complete these steps, you’re ready to test and deploy the agent.
In this unit, you learned how Agentforce can provide around-the-clock support to prospective students and reduce the strain on your recruitment and admissions teams. Next, you learn how Education Cloud accelerates the application process for candidates seeking enrollment.