Stow College

Major Recruitment Drive in South Asia

Late April is just about the right time to engage in a major recruitment drive in South Asia.  In addition, it is important to keep alive the existing good relations the College has already built there, so on the 26^th of April at an ungodly hour of the morning, Mike Lofthouse and Kenny Muir met up in Glasgow airport to begin the first leg of the journey to Delhi.  Flights were excellent and everything went to schedule, so by around 11.30 pm (local time) we were checked into our hotel in Delhi.

This won’t be a day by day diary of events – too much repetition in that, but it’s worth noting just a few of the highlights of the trip:

• Meeting with Rooma and Maneeta, Scottish Development International Representatives in Delhi; we have a great working relationship with SDI in Glasgow and through our liaison there, we opened contact with the local reps.  Two very on-the-ball ladies left an important DTI event in a Delhi hotel to spend a couple of hours with us, discussing opportunities for corporate work in the industrial and commercial sectors in India.    They have a good picture of Stow’s key strengths and will seek leads for us to follow up.
• Student recruitment: we had some very busy sessions across the Punjab with well- qualified students who are keen to continue their education with Stow.  We tried to make sure they had a positive experience at the recruitment events and, where possible, began the paper-trail with them there and then.  If they all convert into enrolled students we’d have significantly more than the equivalent of one full class just from these seminars.
• Maximising our efforts and making every day count often involves splitting our time so on Saturday 30^th April Kenny ran a busy recruitment event in Amritsar whilst Mike visited Saffron Public School to formally sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the School and to run a short seminar for 85 pupils so that they could hear about Stow and the opportunities for International study.
• But we can only be there for short periods of time; the sustainable recruitment comes from having a strong, robust and reliable agent network.  So, a big part of the mission was to grow the agent network in both India and Bangladesh.  We succeeded in meeting more than twenty new agents and from that list we’ve accorded ‘Approved Agent’ status to four agents and reached agreements with most of the rest to work towards ‘approved’ status over the next few years, depending on their performance.
• The big step change which has come from this trip is the establishment of a Regional Office to take some of the administrative load off Stow, and to improve the speed of response to applicants there.  One of most experienced and trusted agents has agreed to allow his premises to double as ‘Stow India’ and he’ll act as the clearing house for applications from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.  And all this, without adding to the cost base of our operations.

Next steps.   Part of the thinking behind the Regional Office and the enhanced agency network is to reduce the need for Stow staff to travel there for recruitment purposes; we’ll never be in a place where no visits are necessary – there’s a need to make personal appearances to maintain strong relationships.  But hopefully more can be done through the network, leaving us free to develop new markets.  Remember that India alone is such a big a market that our work in the Punjab has barely even scratched the surface of demand.  But we do need to visit other centres in India and maybe Nepal to keep growing our market and bringing more opportunity to the South Asian population and more income to the College.

There are some new options and opportunities in the wind just now – through some of our HE partners who find us reliable partners to work with.  We’ll report on them as they firm up.  In the meantime we hope you’ll welcome the next inflow of students in June for pre-sessional English then in August to our mainstream HND programmes