Employment after graduation is a goal of the vast majority of graduates, and on-campus recruiting by employers plays a key role in helping students realize this goal. Additionally, the College highly values the contributions employers make towards developing strong engineering talent through co-ops and internships. Employers are welcomed on campus, and faculty and staff are encouraged to make connections that result in employment opportunities for students and alumni. The following policies were established to help ensure that 1) students have equal employment opportunity, 2) the recruiting environment is fair for all employers, 3) students are not subjected to unwanted solicitation and 4) the educational mission of the College is not adversely affected.
College of Engineering Policies Related to On-Campus Recruiting by External Employers
Faculty and staff are asked to please help to minimize problems by ensuring these policies are followed. (To see the rational for the policy, click on the policy statement.)
Rational: Only employers offering professional employment are allowed to recruit on campus because these positions are most important to our students. Supporting/managing employers offering lesser positions would result in fewer professional employment opportunities due to time and space limitations. ISU must treat all employers fairly, so we cannot allow certain companies to recruit on campus for carpenters, for example, unless we also support operations seeking welders, machinists, farm hands, etc. Companies looking to hire for non-professional positions have other options such as the student job board, the ISU Daily or holding off-campus events to connect with students.
Rational: Career Services has had numerous problems with recruiting agencies violating FERPA regulations and misleading students. While there are reputable staffing agencies, ECS does not have the resources to evaluate agencies and distinguish the good from the bad. Therefore, our approach is to make students aware that employment agencies are an option should they choose to use one.
Rational: Internships are professional work experiences that provide students with experiential-learning opportunities. To qualify as an engineering internship, a significant portion of the tasks must be engineering related. Some employers do not understand the concept of an internship and require students to perform mainly administrative or general labor tasks. To prevent this situation, it is necessary to require a minimum level of engineering-related tasks.
Rational: To ensure effective learning/development and to prevent interns from making mistakes that could cause harm to the intern and/or the employer, interns must receive adequate supervision and mentoring. One intern per supervisor is preferred, but two interns per supervisor is acceptable. The assigned supervisor must be performing an engineering or project management function.
The US Department of Labor’s position is that when an electronic job board like CyHire is operated, all professional employment opportunities must be promoted using the system to ensure EEO compliance. Positions that don’t qualify for posting on CyHire can be posted on the student job board and/or in the ISU Daily.
Rational: Same as above plus student organizations should not be organizing recruiting events for employers. There are EEO concerns when the events are limited to the group’s membership since not all student may feel comfortable being part of the organization or the group’s membership criteria or fees may exclude some qualified job candidates.
Rational: The weeks before and after a career fair are an especially busy times for students. During the week prior to a career fair, energy is focused on preparing for the fair. In the week following a fair, several thousand interviews will take place on campus. This blackout period spreads the recruiting activities and helps create recruiting equity surrounding the career fair. Additionally, this arrangement gives other CoE organizations an opportunity to use the green-space/common areas for events that don’t involve recruiting by employers.
Rational: The College has an obligation to provide all employers with fair and equitable access to our students. If one employer is allowed to hold a recruiting event in an engineering building during the day then all employers must be provided the same opportunity. College of Engineering space is heavily utilized during the hours of 8:00am to 4:00pm and it is not possible to accommodate all but a few employers during this timeframe. Also, recruiting events of this type have the potential to subject students to unwanted solicitation and interfere with the educational mission of the College. Recruiting events held before 4:00pm will be off the main foot-traffic routes so students have the option to approach and engage with recruiters.
Rational: Students have the right to a quality education without unwanted commercials or solicitations. Many employers would like the opportunity to tell a captive audience about their company and employment opportunities, but this type of presentation should be limited to information sessions, which students have the option to attend. When a guest speaker is allowed in the classroom, he/she should not be allowed to collect student contact information, because some students may feel pressure to provide the information.
Rational: The Department of Labor views individuals that assist in the hiring selection process as employment agents, who can be implicated in discrimination lawsuits. This would open individuals and ISU to legal risk. Additionally, some employers will stop recruiting at ISU if they feel that other employers are given special access to top talent.
Adopted July 2017 after review by the College of Engineering Dean, senior leadership and ECIAC members.