Not with a one-off campus visit or a booth at a career fair. The companies getting this right build a repeatable sourcing system, not a seasonal event.
One Dutch university alliance is already doing this at a sector level. A campaign was launched to attract international master's students specifically for semiconductor roles, with the explicit goal of getting them to build their careers inside that industry, according to the initiative's own stated aim reported around the program's launch. That's not vague employer branding. That's a pipeline built around one sector's actual hiring need.
A structured sourcing approach for tech talent looks a lot like our own approach to filling scarce security roles under new compliance pressure: you don't wait for the right candidate to apply, you build the relationships before the vacancy exists. That means university partnerships tied to specific programs, not generic "tech faculty" outreach. It means internship-to-hire tracks that actually lead somewhere. It means thesis projects that double as extended interviews.
It also means talking to alumni networks and international student communities directly, rather than assuming a job posting will find its way to the right inbox. And it means someone on your side actually understanding the visa and post-study work pathway well enough to explain it clearly, because that's often the first real question a graduate asks.
We built our own Delivery Sprint process around exactly this logic: intake, sourcing, and interviews as one connected sequence instead of scattered actions. Applied to international graduates, that means we know which programs feed which roles before a client even asks.
