How Auckland University of Technology supercharged its recruitment strategy with IQ

With the sector undergoing and impressive rebound, higher education institutions are looking to maximise their recruitment strategies in a highly competitive market. Using IDP’s range of innovative IQ tools, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) has been building its recruitment blueprint to attract overseas students.

We spoke with AUT International Analyst, Liam Gorrie, to get the inside scoop on how his institution is effectively harnessing IQ tools, and why having a forward-thinking, data-informed international education strategy is crucial in today’s sector.

What IQ tools and services are you currently subscribed to?

Out of the paid subscriptions, we are subscribed to IQ Benchmarking, IQ Pricing, and IQ Portfolio. We’ve also made quite extensive use of the Emerging Futures data, the sector data, and IQ Demand.

What challenges were you previously facing which drove your decision to use IQ?

We had an absence of third-party data for the pre-applicant phase and we wanted to know about subject demand, our competition, and which markets were popular. Of course, we can use internal data sets but we’re not getting the full picture. Just knowing the IDP business model, we thought IDP would have a great range of different markets that are very successful and could help identify all those criteria.

With New Zealand’s education sector currently rebounding from difficult recent times, what did you hope to achieve when you first started using IQ?

In the past couple of years, it’s been difficult to recruit students offshore. Now that the semester is open in 2023, we can resume offshore recruitment again in earnest. We just wanted to make sure we were advertising to the correct students, in the correct cities, in the correct subjects. IQ has really helped formulate our marketing strategy and now we have resumed recruiting offshore, ensuring our conversion rates are comparable. We were obviously quite worried that with a three-year hiatus in offshore recruitment we might struggle to convert the applicants to enrolments but having access to the IQ Benchmarking helps us to track our progress and see where we can make improvements.

How has IQ helped inform your strategic decision-making?

It’s great to have an authoritative dataset to triangulate some of the assumptions that we’re making from other data. You can test your assumptions and test your hypotheses. We use benchmarking quite a lot in formulating strategy, and having access to the IQ services has really helped to check that our benchmarking group is correct. Obviously, when you’re driving our strategy to compete against other universities, you want to ensure you’re competing against the correct ones.

Can you provide any quantifiable examples in how IQ has assisted in achieving your objectives?

We have used IQ data to produce our recruitment plan for 2023 and 2024, based on the demand we’re seeing. Additionally, we used the IQ Pricing tool to help formulate a fee strategy, because it’s such an important component if our product and marketing strategy. Now we’re in the phase that we are working with different stakeholders around the university based on that strategy. Nothing tangible right now, but if you ask me in a month, we’ll have our recruitment strategy approved and our pricing strategy approved.

What impressed you most about our IQ tools and our dataset?

I really like the comprehensive institution list which has mixture of polytechnics, PTE’s in New Zealand (Private trainings and establishments), universities, and different areas that we can benchmark our demand and pricing against. It provides a 360 view of our pricing, demand, and our source markets. As an analyst, I love the progression of screens. So, you have a first screen that’s good with high-level data, which helps for management level, but for your second screen, you can drill down into different layers to get the fine detail. It can really satisfy your curiosity and translate that to formulating those strategies. One thing I really liked is, being based on the tableau platform, I have been able to extract some data as well. If you want to create your own visualisations or blend it with other data, you have then you’ve got that opportunity to do so which is exceptionally useful.

Why do you think tapping into macro, aggregated data in order to develop an international education strategy is so important?

Sometimes other third-party data you might have questions about, however I know when looking at IDP data that it’s going to be reliable and accurate. If you only use your internal data then quite often, you’re only looking at what is currently successful. Using IDP data and search data, it shows your demand much earlier in the cycle, so you can anticipate what subjects and markets are going to be popular in the future. The importance of that is being able to build brand awareness, which can pay dividends just as much as having good rankings in that area. If you’re sending out marketing advertisements, liaising with IDP counsellors and having access to third-party data, it can really help get you into that market early.