UT has partnered with businesses in the area to form the Greater Knoxville Area Consortium of Employers (GKACE).
GKACE was organized to help Knoxville-area employers attract students from the university.
“We deal with two very distinct and different types of recruiters,” Russ Coughenour, director of UT Career Services, said. “The first type of recruiter that we deal with more of would be the national type of recruiter, whose company has a formal college recruiting team. There are people that are dedicated to focus on recruiting at major college campuses across the country. … That’s the main type of employer we work with. We also have the local type of recruiter that would be in the greater Knoxville area, East Tennessee-based employer, that does not have a team of recruiters or deep recruiting pockets or budgets. It’s that second type of employer that we are focusing the GKACE project on.”
The goal of GKACE is to attract students to local businesses that they normally would not have heard of and level the playing fields between local and national recruiters.
“We know we have a lot of students that come to the University of Tennessee that want to stay in the area after graduation, but the recruiter isn’t as sophisticated in knowing how to recruit that student as say, by recruiters from Enterprise,” Coughenour said.
As of now, 13 businesses within a 75-mile radius of Knoxville are members of GKACE, including the Knoxville News Sentinel, Jewelry TV and First Tennessee Bank.
“As a recruiter in the Northeast Tennessee area, I believe that this is an excellent program to encourage students to stay in the area after graduation,” Tina Davis, who is a recruiter for a large company based in Northeast Tennessee, said. “I’ll have students that come up to me, and after talking to them for a while, I will tell them they must stay in the area after they graduate for this job. A lot of times, students will say they don’t want to stay here. GKACE would greatly help us reach students more effectively.”
When students sign up for the Hire-A-Vol service on the Career Services website, they are prompted by the question, “Which of the following best identifies your post-graduation employment preferences?”
Students then have three options, two of which make the student searchable to the GKACE members.
Students can also change their minds and update their preferences.
Local employers can sign up and pay a fee of $299, part of which will go towards a scholarship fund.
“GKACE will be run on a yearly subscription of $299,” Coughenour said. “We are going to take either 30, 40 or 50 percent and put it in a scholarship fund. The scholarship fund will be available for students from the greater Knoxville area to apply for.”
The scholarship does not require the student to return to the area after graduation.
Upcoming events for GKACE include a showcase on Nov. 2 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the University Center.
“What we want to do is feature the members in job fair format where they can talk to our student body about the opportunities that their company has,” Coughenour said. “So if you’re a student interested in staying in the area, you can come to this event and know that every company is from the Knoxville area and would not ask you to relocate at the point of hire.”
