At smaller colleges, enrollment pressure has moved well beyond the admissions office. Faculty contracts increasingly include recruiting expectations. That’s not unreasonable — faculty have real influence with prospective students. But the guidance that follows is often thin. “Go recruit” doesn’t tell anyone what to do on Monday morning.

This is a question of strategic fit, not just effort. The faculty member who makes the most impact isn’t the one who works the hardest at recruiting. It’s the one who identifies the specific contribution only they can make — and builds from there.

Start With Your Strengths, Not a List of Tasks

Think of a faculty member’s relationship to the recruitment process the way you’d think of a specialist on a surgical team. The surgeon doesn’t do everything. They do the part that requires exactly their training.

Before a faculty member takes a single recruiting action, they should answer three questions:

Who do you already know?

Alumni, professional peers, high school teachers, community college advisors, industry contacts. Enrollment teams spend significant resources building relationships that faculty often already have. Your warmest recruiting leads are probably already in your network — they just haven’t been asked.

What can you authentically speak to?

Faculty can describe the academic and professional experience of being in a program from the inside. That’s something no recruiter can replicate. A prospective student who hears a faculty member say “here’s what we actually do in the classroom, and here’s where graduates go” gets signal that a brochure never delivers.

Where do students make decisions?

Some programs feed from specific high schools, community colleges, or industries. Faculty with existing presence in those channels — guest speakers, adjuncts, advisory board members — are already embedded in the right places. Those relationships have recruiting value that hasn’t been activated.

Recruiting Is More About Listening Than Telling

When faculty do engage in recruiting, the most common failure isn’t lack of effort. It’s talking too much.

Faculty are trained to explain things. That skill is essential in the classroom. In a recruiting conversation, it works against you.

A prospective student sitting across from a department chair isn’t looking for a program overview. They’re trying to figure out whether this place is right for them. When faculty spend the conversation pitching features and outcomes, they skip the part that actually closes the student: listening to what matters to this specific person.

The most effective faculty recruiters ask more than they tell. They treat the conversation the way a good advisor would — finding out what the student is trying to solve, and then connecting the program to that.

A Framework for Prioritizing Your Actions

If you’re a faculty member with new recruiting responsibilities and limited time, here’s a simple way to prioritize:

High ROI (start here):

• Reach out personally to alumni who could refer current students or return for advanced study

• Identify one or two feeder schools or organizations where you already have a relationship and deepen it intentionally

• Make yourself available for campus visits — and prepare to have a conversation, not a presentation

Medium ROI (build toward this):

• Develop a short, clear answer to “why this program” that focuses on student outcomes, not program features

• Offer to be the first point of contact after an admitted student expresses interest in your department

• Contribute to content (posts, short videos, testimonials) that allows prospective students to hear your voice before they arrive on campus

Lower ROI (don’t start here):

• Generic outreach to cold lists without an existing relationship

• Large fair appearances without a specific follow-up strategy

• Any activity that feels like volume — calls made, booths attended — without a clear next step

A Note for Presidents and Enrollment Leaders

If you’re asking faculty to recruit, you have a coaching responsibility that often doesn’t get named.

Faculty didn’t go into their careers to be admissions counselors. Some will be resistant. Many will simply be uncertain. The ones who lean in may still struggle, pitching when they should be listening, or spending energy on low-impact activity because no one helped them think through what high-impact looks like for them specifically.

Three things make a real difference:

1. Give them a specific lane, not a general mandate. “Help us recruit” is not a strategy. “We want you involved with admitted students in your department” or “we’d like you to build a relationship with the community college advisor you already know” — those are actionable.

2. Pair them with enrollment staff, not replace them. Faculty should complement your enrollment team, not duplicate it. That means clear handoffs: who does what, when, and how leads get tracked.

3. Recognize the activity, not just the result. Faculty won’t control whether a student enrolls. They will control whether they make the call, have the conversation, and show up. Reward the process and the commitment — not just the headcount.

Faculty recruitment works when it’s built on genuine relationships and honest conversations. It fails when it’s treated as an extension of the enrollment operation without the investment in making faculty successful in a role they weren’t trained for.

The institutions that get this right aren’t asking faculty to become recruiters. They’re asking them to do something more valuable: be themselves, strategically.