Graduate students as target group of the university's marketing acivities

The authors present a study which was conducted against the background of emergent problems in German academic recruitment processes. An increasingly strong competition among potential employers for top university graduates leads to a growing importance of personnel marketing strategies both from a theoretical and from a practical perspective. For universities in particular, it is of great importance to recruit excellent students who are highly motivated and qualified for teaching and research jobs. Despite of this necessity, only very few contributions in literature address the field of personnel marketing for institutions of higher education to date. This paper therefore analyzes the academic recruitment problem on a broad theoretical and empirical basis and draws conclusions for improved academic personnel marketing strategies.