Hilka Leicht is the founder and owner of IEC, a student recruitment agency that is growing at an astonishing rate. The PIE caught up with Hilka at the fifth annual AIRC conference to talk about the obstacles between agents and US institutions, navigating the Hungarian market, and building a company
The PIE: So tell me a bit about IEC.
HL: IEC is a university level recruitment agency in Germany which I founded in 2001 as a subsidiary of a Norwegian company which recruited to the US, Australia and to England. IEC’s history with quite a lot of our partners actually goes back to 1995. I was brought in to build the German branch and later on, in 2008, the owner sold the Finnish and Norwegian branches to somebody else and sold IEC in Germany to me.
I started IEC as a small agency, which had the role of opening up the German market to Australian institutions. After a few years I took on New Zealand institutions, and then after a couple more years I started to open up to institutions in other destinations.
The PIE: Do you have a background in international education?
HL: I studied Russian and I taught for the German Academic Exchange Service at the State University of St Petersburg, so I was in that sphere already. But still, it was a totally new start because my focus was East, and all of a sudden I started up this new company which was looking West. I had to brush up my high school English!
“Back then this was a totally foreign thing to students. Banks and companies had still not discovered that they could sell stuff to students”
Back then it was a totally foreign thing to them. Banks and companies had still not discovered that they could sell stuff to students; there was no marketing done at institutions.
The PIE: How is IEC?
HL: We have 22 staff members based in our Berlin office, plus two in Hungary and we represent just over 100 institutions in 14 countries. In 2013, we successfully enrolled just over 1,000 students and we anticipate that it will be around 1,400-1,500 in 2014, so there’s strong growth in the German market at the moment.
The PIE: What’s fuelling the growth?
HL: Multiple things – the way I built the company, I always focused on a clear service profile and heavily invested in growth. I hired the right people and introduced a very good service for students, which German institutions appreciate a lot.
“Institutions see us as a partner in enabling international student mobility”
I developed a service for institutions as well, so they see us as a partner in enabling international student mobility. They have the exchanges and the free movers they send through us. I guess that is the right way to go: to partner closely with German and also international institutions.
The PIE: You said that you prefer to have a targeted approach, rather than feel like a big agency – how does that work?
HL: Of course you have to reach out to students in some general ways, to build a brand, but we have one marketing staff member responsible only for making sure that each institution that signs up with us really gets the attention in the market.
There’s also people who are supported by country specialists in the team, who will make sure that when the IEC student advisors talk to students, every institution gets the attention and the students they can get from the German market through us.
The PIE: You mentioned social media marketing – how does technology help you in marketing to students?
HL: Technology’s incredibly important. We’ve been producing university video clips, so universities will invest in this with us and arrange marketing campaigns around that. I’ve got five staff trained in social media marketing and the student advisors use Facebook as well.
The PIE: Are the majority of the students you work with from Germany?
HL: Yes. There’s some from Austria and Switzerland, and now we’re targeting Hungary.
The PIE: Tell more about what what’s driving demand in Hungary.
HL: Institutions in Hungary have always had two types of places in their programmes: government-funded places and places where students had to pay fees. With this year, the government has cut funded places down to 25% of what it used to be. That means a lot of students won’t get a government-funded place, and they pay, depending on the course, €2000-€5000 per year. That’s quite an investment.
“Students on government scholarships now have to sign a contract in which they promise that they will work in Hungary for twice the length of their course”
The government-funded programmes now have a restriction: students on government scholarships have to sign a contract in which they promise they will work in Hungary for twice the length of their course within 20 years. That’s a restriction that not many young Hungarians like because they want to see the world and a lot of them want to work abroad at some point.
The PIE: Is that a market you see growing a lot?
HL: Currently the US is getting 700 students from Hungary, so even if there’s 100% growth that’s only 1,400 students from the whole country. So it’s not really worthwhile just to target that one market, but to do it along with other markets in Europe is a good idea.
The PIE: What are the biggest challenges that you’ve faced so far as an agent?
HL: Well, there are different perspectives. Growing a company is an incredibly difficult task, of course. It’s very important to make it a stable company where you don’t have to be there at all and it still works. I took that step around three years ago but a lot of small companies have difficulty taking that step to become independent of their founder.
“It’s been incredibly difficult in the first few years to find appropriate partners in the US”
Looking into the US as a market, it’s been incredibly difficult in the first few years to find appropriate partners. A lot of institutions started to open up for recruitment because of financial reasons, but they were comparing a semester programme to an eight-semester programme, where they receive eight times as much in tuition. It was very difficult to talk to universities who would see that this is a market.
The PIE: You’re a founding member of AIRC and were among the first agents to be accredited. What made you want to get involved?
HL: It’s about development. That’s probably something I’ll never stop doing: developing myself, developing the company, always trying to take yet another step towards improving quality. And I think this is exactly what AIRC’s doing, because you cannot be good at something if you keep it under the table. You can only improve things if a lot of people look at it, discuss it, and form a common understanding of where you want it to be.
The PIE: Do you think the impression of agents among US providers is changing for the better?
HL: Yeah, that’s somewhere where AIRC did a great job; almost every institution I speak to has heard of AIRC. The biggest hurdle, or the organisation that spoke against agents the most, was NACAC. And now that problem’s been eliminated, I think nobody’s going to stop the development of quality work between universities and agents.
