It’s the end of January and that means many employers are gearing up for college recruiting. The spring semester is a flurry of excitement and keeps recruiters busy, traveling from one campus to the next. But how will students know when you’ll be at their school? Consider adding an events calendar to your corporate career site. And, here’s how to do it–at no cost.

GOOGLE TO THE RESCUE

Not long ago, I vetted a few calendar technology vendors, and was impressed with the bells and whistles offered. But, my budget was tight. (Sound familiar?) So, after doing a little digging, it just so happened that Google already had what I was looking for–for free! To get started, I recommend checking out the Google Event Publisher Guide and then:

1. Connect with your IT department to discuss internal protocol for using third-party applications.
2. Get the “Recruiting Calendar” project on IT’s priority list (unless you’re a programmer and can code, test and deploy).
3. Create your Google Calendar account; consider using a general email address and password so co-workers can access and add events, too.
4. Once the calendar is created, you can grab the code and send it to IT to embed on your career site.

Initially, I found it helpful to work with my IT team and play with the calendar while in a dev environment. From there, I created a step-by-step user document to share with my company’s recruiters and offered training sessions. For the first few weeks, you might want to conduct periodic audits to ensure that events are added correctly and look good on the live site. And, as new recruiters join your team, remember to share the user doc with them.

FEED YOUR CALENDAR TO TWITTER

In addition to populating your career site with events, you can grab the Google Calendar XML feed and synch it with your career-related Twitter handles. I used HootSuite and IFTTT to set this up and it was so easy a caveman could have done it! Not to mention, having the events auto-feed to Twitter is a huge time saver.