Are You A Status Seeker? A Career Revitalizer?

HELPING SCHOOLS BETTER DIRECT THEIR RESOURCES

Who might make the most use of such information? Primarily schools, Chowfla says. Applicants are who they are, he says, but for schools, “understanding which segment a person fits into enables a school to target a much more refined message towards that particular candidate … therefore you are improving (schools’) recruitment abilities and the yield of their recruitment activities.”

By way of example, he points to two segments: Socioeconomic Climbers, or people who are very much driven by money and an increase in salary; and Skill Upgraders, who are primarily interested in personal development and the acquisition of leadership skills and other skill sets. “These are two diametrically opposite segments in a sense,” Chowfla says, “as one is heavily driven by the learning and the skill that you’ll get, and the other is heavily driven by the salary increase that you’ll get.” A school with a program more geared toward one segment would hardly be well served in expending recruitment resources aimed at the other, he says.

“The other thing a school can really do is, it can look at their current application base or their enrollment and map that to those segments — they can see who they are actually attracting,” Chowfla says. “In our research, most schools already have some form of segmentation that they use. However, that segmentation is generally demographic, saying men or women or Asians or Indians or U.S. students — it is all very anecdotal, if you will. What the school can now get is, they have a scientific base of data which is a global population that they can look at.”

GMAC provides schools with a tool to map their application and enrollment bases so they can see who gravitates toward them naturally, “and then they can make decisions around whether that’s appropriate or whether they need to increase their outreach in a particular area,” Chowfla says. “On another level, I think schools can also use it for program design — if a school identifies an opportunity to target or attract Impactful Innovators, for example … then they can actually define their program and the messaging of their program in a way that targets Impactful Innovators.”

Alternatively, he says, if a school has a program that is very strong on entrepreneurship, it can actively target the kind of candidates who will respond to their message — i.e., Impactful Innovators — without wasting recruitment resources going after a general set of candidates, “many of whom will not respond to their message.”

(See following page for a closer look at the rest of the GME candidate segments)

Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.