By Jeremy Tiers, Senior Director of Admissions Services
1 minute read
“The simple question of how are you feeling has been transformational with the people I lead and the new relationships I’ve built.”
That was the text message I received last week from an Assistant Director at a university we partnered with on training earlier this year.
If you’ve never used, or you don’t typically use language like, “How are you feeling about…”, I encourage you to start incorporating it immediately in your conversations with prospective students and their parents as well as with colleagues, and if you’re a leader, with the people you manage.
That phrase is effective because it sounds casual, curious, personal, and empathetic.
From a recruiting standpoint, it’s not something that prospective students hear very often from their counselor or another college representative during their search.
Instead, students continue to get pummeled with information and language that’s full of big words and phrases, sounds overly formal, feels very impersonal, and ends with something like, “Let me know if you have any questions.”
If you want to build more trust and strengthen your recruiting relationship with inquiries right now, try asking one of these questions during your 1-1 chat or as a call to action in an upcoming email:
“How do you feel when you think about college?”
“How are you feeling about the idea of living in a college dorm with a roommate?”
“What kind of classroom environment do you feel like you’d be most comfortable in?”
The friendlier, more relaxed, more personal, and more empathetic you sound and your questions are, the better the chances you’ll get a response or a reply. Try it out, and let me know how it works for you.
If you’d like to talk more about this article, go ahead and reply back or email me here.
And if you found this article helpful, I encourage you to forward it to someone else on your campus who could also benefit from reading it.