RUPA Insider: Recruitment

Recruitment may mean many things to you at Rutgers. It could mean rushing a sorority or fraternity or being offered an internship by an on-campus recruiter. Well, here at RUPA, we do recruitment too, but like anything we do in this organization, we make sure it’s awesome and unique. RUPA holds recruitment for the new council members at the start of the spring semester every school year. This year, I was given the privilege of leading the recruitment campaign with my HR and Marketing Directors, RUPA Advisors, and the Rutgers Media Team. I was excited about starting this campaign, but little did I know just exactly how much was involved. So, if you’re wondering how this all played out and how exactly RUPA plans and executes our recruitment campaign, keep reading for an exclusive look into how we bring the most passionate individuals into our organization!

Around November of the fall semester, the people I mentioned above sat down for our first recruitment meeting. We collaborated on different ideas that would make our campaign distinctive from previous years. We started with many ideas, but focused on the one that you can see today- a wordle. After finalizing this theme, we collected words from RUPA council members that describe what RUPA does and what RUPA means to them. A wordle may seem simple at first, but just deciding on the final set of words to use and the design took a month! Simultaneously, our team was coming up with ideas on a general theme of the campaign and how we wanted the recruitment video to look. As a team of people very passionate about the RUPA brand’s social media growth, we recognized what a huge impact social media is making on college students in terms of inclusion, connection, and communication. That’s when the idea of implementing social media in our campaign by creating a Snapchat video was born.

If you’re a Rutgers student on Snapchat, you surely must have watched many Rutgers Campus Stories. We love seeing the diverse people on campus come together through technology to share their opinions on a topic, so we figured we’d do the same, but with different members of RUPA. We invited a few RUPA council members to be a part of our “RUPA Snapchat Story” and began writing the script.

Filming was done during winter break where we had the wonderful Media Team help us bring our vision to reality. We filmed all day, all around the College Avenue campus, to get a variety of footage to use. After a few weeks and multiple drafts, we had our final video! Of course while all of the editing was happening, we were still working on finalizing flyer designs, how we will market recruitment once the spring semester starts, and the general timeline of recruitment such as applications and interviews.

If you visit our Facebook page (RUPA Rutgers) you will see all of our hard work revolving around recruitment. Whether you notice the cover photo, various posts on our timeline, our wordle design, and the video, these were all once just ideas on a page. Be sure to watch the video now that you have inside knowledge on how it was created! RUPA’s goal with this recruitment campaign was to connect with Rutgers students through a technological platform. We wanted you to see and hear our RUPA council members in the video and feel like you could relate to them, that they’re students just like you who want to share their stories through a snap in time.

Now, as we wait for the application deadline to approach, the recruitment team hopes that our campaign was able to inspire so many bright students to join our family. We hope that our message of growth and experience was conveyed in a way that reaches every student on campus.

I will always be grateful for having the chance to be on the Recruitment Campaign Team. I remember the Recruitment Campaign last year and how that inspired me to apply for RUPA. Now, I was able to do the same for others. If you have ever imagined yourself planning and creating any of the events RUPA holds throughout the year, then I urge you to apply for the 2017/2018 RUPA council.

This is our RUPA experience, what’s yours? Join RUPA, and maybe you could be leading the RUPA Recruitment Campaign next year.

— Anokhi Magodia, Assistant Director of Human Resources and Marketing