Following the resounding success of the Highered workshop, “Surprise Employers: Super Tips to Stand Out During Your Job Search,” where Albert Segura Molla conducted the first session of the Highered Online Workshop Series, we decided to sit down with him and delve into his transformative insights on career innovation and student engagement. Albert shares his mission to infuse excitement and accessibility into career advice, offering a unique perspective on empowering talents. Dive into the strategies that made the workshop such a huge success. Discover how Highered serves as a key ally in Albert’s mission, providing global opportunities, impactful surveys, and marketing insights.
Tell us about your current role.
I am a Gen Z heading the Career Services at Antwerp Management School on a mission to make exciting and innovative career advice, resources, and tools more accessible – which I also share publicly via The Career Supporter Newsletter on LinkedIn.
Share your recent experience from your Highered Online Workshop: Surprise Employers: Super Tips to Stand Out During Your Job Search.
I couldn’t be more excited to be part of and have led the kickoff workshop on the new initiative from Maria and the Highered team to support early career talent globally with the most meaningful career tools, strategies, and advice from all we know in career services!
It was a really impactful experience. We crossed 400+ registrations and more than 180 students from all our schools in the Highered Talent Community joined the session their energy, gratitude, and career proactivity were immense!!
The session was about surprising them and myself in 3 main parts for those interested in the material we covered:
👉 HR insider revelations to understand who can influence your ability to get hired and how.
👉 A wide range of actionable strategies to surprise employers early in application processes.
👉 A super Job Search Strategy that will help them structure the way they search for a job in their entire career in a way that feels more authentic, proactive and joyful!
Can’t wait for the upcoming workshops to be held by the Highered EFMD career services network to scale up our impact and support talent with exciting resources and support!
Many of the career teams from our EFMD school network are struggling with student engagement. Name one way you engage your students.
I have a little magical formula that has helped me 4x student engagement in the last 2 years. It is a mix of what we see in the career services conferences on the trends of what the new talent generations care about and from my Gen Z perspective.
Here are some ideas that work really well for us:
- Use of emojis and personal communication from the heart via email. 💙
- Share event registrations less than 1 week in advance 3 – 4 days before when we know they are planning their weeks (as like me they go week by week in their minds) – they love emails on weekends… Saturday around noon is what gives us more traction or emails during the lunch breaks during the week.
- Focus on the “fear of missing out” component and make it very clear is “totally optional for them to come” that they have the choice (even in the middle of the session) + making all the events a community/social gathering experience (for example we have a private community in LinkedIn where we do a post after every event with the photos of the best smiles and they love it + also gives a good platform to cooperate with companies on employer branding).
- Share always actionable presents and tools at the end of the most important sessions – in the post.
- Focus on appreciation – we share tons of compliments on their super engagement, career energy, and proactivity and that motivates them a lot!!
- Involve the Global Recruiting Teams at the end of career masterclasses to verify the advice we give and to have an unfiltered live Q&A – they love quick 15 minutes behind the scenes with sexy employers as well as have insights into private information that feels exclusive to them.
- Focus on bringing LinkedIn Top Voices in almost all our career masterclasses motivates them to come to an extent that is still surprising to me!
What innovative career service have you recently developed for your talent?
As we saw in the recent EFMD Coffee with Careers I moderated with Maria and Highered, one of our strategic priorities in career services is “social impact careers”. For us, it is one of our biggest priorities as we see our talent wanting to climb the purpose and social ladder rather than the corporate ladder more and more. We are moving away from trying to bring nonprofits, etc., on campus in the same way we do with corporate partners and leveraging more the power of the leading global community for social impact careers and changemakers with The Bloom, where they can get access to curated social impact resources + well-paid career opportunities in social impact + stories of changemakers and more via their newsletter focusing on storytelling, all aligning with all our engagement plan I shared above!
How does Highered help make your role more successful?
Two ways Highered has really helped our career services are:
- Highered gives our students access to global career opportunities via their amazing job board filled with opportunities with top employers globally as well as participating in the EFMD global career fairs. Also, a secret between you and me, the marketing at Highered is amazing and it provides us with lots of ideas on how to communicate better and more impactfully using technology with all our talent!
- Highered Surveys: all the talent insights they share with data coming from all our talent all over Europe and the world is really a very powerful source for us to make strategic decisions to support our talent more meaningfully.
Closing words from Albert to Highered Talent and our Schools
If you are reading this and curious to learn more or connect, please send me a note on LinkedIn. Here is my profile link. Let’s stay connected within our community as we pursue our shared mission of enhancing accessibility to innovative resources discovered in career services for all our talents and the global audience!
