Students of MSC 480, Entrepreneurship Capstone Experience, discuss ways to distribute information about their CIA recruitment fair to be held at 5 p.m. today. The group has been working with an advertising agency and the CIA to create marketing strategies for recruiting new CIA employees.
Supply chain management senior Daniel Tuthill got a glimpse into the mystery behind the CIA when his class was asked to create a marketing program targeting students to work for the agency.
Today is scheduled to mark the culmination of the eight-person class’ work, as the agency will visit and recruit on campus using the marketing plan set forth by the students.
“It shows confidence in our university, and we have a huge student body, and we have a good marketing program, so I think it was a no-brainer for them,” Tuthill said.
The class, called Entrepreneurship Capstone Experience, or MSC 480, plans to host an event beginning at 5 p.m. in rooms 115 and 117 of the Eppley Center. The group was given a $2,500 budget from the CIA to conduct focus groups and produce a marketing campaign targeting students for the event.
At the event, CIA officers will answer student’s questions in conjunction with hosting a video game tournament and a inflatable sumo wrestling competition, among other activities.
At 6:30 p.m., officers will give a presentation about opportunities students have within the CIA.
The event is open to the public.
Tuthill said he was surprised to learn the CIA needed recruits.
“We all know what the CIA is, but we don’t know much about the CIA, and we don’t really think of them as needing to recruit people,” he said.
The CIA did not return calls for comment.
The class was paired with the CIA by EdVenture Partners, a marketing firm that partners marketing classes with companies to give them professional experience, EdVenture Partners Account Manager Jennifer Hershiser said.
“We partner a marketing class with a company in the public or private sector that has a real world marketing or recruiting problem,” she said.
“The CIA, based on their current recruitment needs … picked three campuses across the nation. They just basically picked the schools based upon enrollment numbers, undergraduates versus graduates, amount of diversity, demographics of campus, along with the majors that the school has to offer.”
Tuthill said the CIA is targeting college students because of a lack of quality applicants.
“Their end goal is to get as many qualified applicants to show up to this event as possible,” he said.
“They get plenty of applications, especially with the economy right now, but there’s just not qualified applicants.”
Tuthill said the CIA wants people for various jobs who have a certain set of skills, such as a knowledge of second languages, especially Arabic or African languages.
The CIA’s Web site, www.cia.gov, includes job postings for interns to work in Washington, D.C.
Forrest Carter, the professor of the class, said it is important the CIA uses student input to target people about to graduate.
“The biggest thing is tapping into student creativity in terms of how to deliver a message that reaches the target audience, which is fellow students,” he said. “It gives (the CIA) some insight that they maybe couldn’t get by using standard marketing research or public marketing firms.
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“The other thing is from a social networking perspective — just getting the word out in a more credible fashion about opportunities that they do have.”
Hershiser said that any company’s decision to use the student marketing program in the future depends on the company.
“They usually cherry-pick from each one so they won’t use an exact replica of what an exact campus did, but they’ll make a combination of what the students have done,” she said.
“We really don’t have a return on investment, so to say. We don’t have a percentage but it does happen often.”
Tuthill said Carter has allowed the students to drive this project.
“Professor (Carter) is awesome. He just lets us go,” Tuthill said.
“Everything that we decided was by us. He was more of a support role. Everything that we wanted to implement, we implemented, assuming it got approved by the CIA.”
