How to Increase Stealth Applicants
Stealth applicants are students who apply to your university or college without first expressing an interest. They appear out of the blue - and with the internet, it's easy for students to find the information they want without contacting your counseling and recruiting team.
This is an important segment to pay attention to because as UniQuest found:
..we’ve noticed stealth applications from international students rise over the years. In the 2016/2017 recruitment cycle, we identified that 85% of the international students we supported to enrollment had applied without making an inquiry before submitting their applications.
Yes, that's a whopping 85%!
This stealth applicant growth should be a nice bonus to your typical marketing and recruitment efforts.
What can you do to increase this?
1. Make sure your institution's website is intuitive
Today’s shopper is mobile, global and review-hungry. Consumers want to interact with businesses on their own time and their own terms. Students are no different. The Internet has enabled students to research, compare, apply to and, disregard institutions without ever having to contact them.
This means your website has to be intuitive, user-friendly, mobile-friendly with a good amount of in-depth information.
2. Make sure your online application form is easy to complete
Nothing is more off-putting than registration or application forms with dozens of fields on one page. To increase the website visitor to stealth applicant conversion rate you must ensure the application form is fairly easy to complete. Some things you can adopt:
- Group the relevant fields into sections and break the sections into separate steps.
- Allow the user to stop and resume the application.
- Make sure it's mobile-optimized.