Toronto Film School
The Evolution of Recruitment for Toronto Film School
Toronto Film School (TFS) is one of Canada’s top-ranked film schools. Operated by Yorkville Education Company, TFS’s creative diploma programs and inspiring environment are responsible for preparing graduates seeking careers in film, entertainment, fashion, design, and video games.
Mentored by an award-winning faculty, students match industry knowledge, professional network and practical skills development to transform creativity into well-rounded innovative projects.
TFS and Yorkville Education Company faced the challenge of streamlining the complex decision process of choosing an educational institution as well as the entire application experience. To achieve that, a new recruitment website was developed as part of an entirely new digital experience for students and prospects to discover all the possibilities of becoming a Toronto Film School graduate.
The goals
The solution was to communicate with prospective students and advisors at the same time, inspiring individuals to pursue their most desired career in entertainment while boosting applications to the Toronto Film School. For Trew Knowledge, the challenge was to design and build a unified digital experience that didn’t exclude any of those audiences and would embrace in-person, video and phone interviews.
During the discovery phase, our teams analyzed interviews, marketing campaigns, and key competitive value points. The analysis highlighted the following motivators that would likely lead to successful applications in a timely manner, versus a few pain points that needed attention.
The Strategy
The solution presented by TK leveraged the insights collected during the discovery phase of the strategic sessions, the information showcased by advisors during sales presentations, YEC’s overall goals, and turned those requirements into a structured and engaging recruitment marketing tool.
The custom navigation flow was entirely designed to empower advisors when presenting programs to prospective applicants and, at the same time, capture the interest of prospective student people who wanted to learn more about joining the industry and converting them into viable prospects.
Included in the solution was also an interactive checklist of steps for applying, which outlined all of the preparation steps required for those students that were ready to begin. Further, what we found to be very important was what happened after the presentation with advisors, which was, sharing and communicating the wonderful opportunities that awaited them, with their support network i.e. parents, guardians or others. This leads to a unique, non logged in experience with personalized advisory contact details and checklist items for the student to share with their network and continue the path to enrollment.
The well-rounded digital solution proposed by the strategic teams brought to the table the following crucial improvements to the recruitment process:
– Create an engaging and interactive admissions process that would lead to trusting relationships between advisors and applicants.
– Redesign the interview process to communicate brand values.
– Reduce the 90-day conversion cycle to lead-to-application.
– Inspire International applicants to study at Toronto Film School.
– Collect insights during the admissions process for continuous improvements.
– Showcase former students’ career achievements.
– Directly influence a prospect’s decision to apply.
Powered by WordPress, the new TFS recruitment website highlighted programs’ values and structures, inspiring industry statistics, faculty and more. The solution also connected prospects and past students interested in sharing their own stories, provided real-time advisor support and collected insights through feedback survey questions. As part of the new admissions strategy, TK introduced a post-interview procedure to help speed up the application conversion cycle.
Key Results
– Supported by radio, social media and pay-per-click marketing campaigns to collect inbound leads, 52 program advisors connected with prospects through a personalized link to perform an interactive presentation guided by a rich new presentation script.
– The new admissions flow also allowed prospects to interact with content related to their chosen programs and build an admission checklist followed by a post-interview experience after the interview step.
– The digital strategy helped increase enrollments by 53%, improved the sales flow to support advisors’ efforts and set Toronto Film School programs apart from the competition.
– A subsequent variation of the recruitment tool was later repurposed for Yorkville University, given the success of the TFS tool.
