PROVO, Utah — Halda, the leading AI Enrollment Platform for higher education, today announced the launch of AI Student Recruiter, the industry’s first agentic artificial intelligence tool that tailors personalized content for each prospective student across all key communication channels: website, email, phone, SMS text messaging, and WhatsApp. Halda’s AI Student Recruiter provides this personalization by remembering user context across all devices and communication channels.
Initially launched in a limited pilot with select institutions, AI Student Recruiter is now available to any college, university, or educational institution. Halda’s pilot partners include Lynn University, University of Montana, and University of West Florida.
“Halda has quickly become one of our most valuable resources for prospective student engagement in terms of inquiries and applicants.Their progressive approach to AI puts us ahead in an ever-more competitive landscape,” said Jenny Petty, Vice President of Marketing Communication, Experience and Engagement at the University of Montana.
Students using AI Student Recruiter get personalized information they need to efficiently make a college decision, increasing the likelihood that an interested prospect becomes an admitted and enrolled student. AI Student Recruiter helps institutions enroll more qualified students without wasting precious resources on outdated marketing tools or recruitment systems that don’t scale or talk to each other. It allows resource-constrained colleges and universities to do the work of potentially hundreds of recruiters and customer service representatives with a single AI agent answering thousands of questions from prospective students.
The new tool is designed for ease of use by prospective students of all ages and backgrounds. It is especially useful for cohorts that increasingly expect a personalized digital experience and prospects who benefit from extra assistance navigating the complexities of admission, enrollment, financial aid, and related topics.
“The college admission and enrollment processes have always been complicated and intimidating for the majority of prospective students,” said Halda Co-Founder and CEO Lance Hydrick, who was a first-generation college student. “With Halda, we’re making it dead simple for interested students to get the personalized information they need efficiently through their preferred channel(s), without requiring resource-constrained learning institutions to invest in costly website overhauls or armies of recruiters.”
Halda’s AI Student Recruiter transforms the university website into a dynamic recruiting hub that serves as a knowledge base about the institution and individual student preferences. The product uses agentic AI technology to create a Netflix-style personalized experience for individuals seeking information about a college, university, or other higher education institution. A prospect completes a brief onboarding form on the institution’s website, enabling Halda to serve up personalized content and offer recommended next steps and real-time Q&A with a human-like AI recruiter on the website or over any digital communication medium.
“Working with Halda has been a great experience—they are always forward-thinking,” said Melissa Webb, Ph.D., Assistant Dean of the Graduate School at University of West Florida. “When the AI pilot was introduced, it was an easy decision to move forward. AI is the future, and Halda consistently prioritizes students by ensuring they receive the information they need. By supporting students, they are also supporting us.”
Halda’s AI Student Recruiter launch represents a milestone in the development of agentic AI technology to benefit higher education with highly relevant use cases aimed at acute pain points. Nationally, higher education is experiencing unprecedented economic pressure, with nearly 100 institutions closing down between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years. While the challenges facing higher education are multi-faceted, outdated recruitment marketing practices contribute to the problem because many students struggle to navigate the complex world of admissions, enrollment, matriculation, financial aid, and other factors involved in pursuing post-secondary degrees and certificates.
“There’s been much discussion about the role of AI in the classroom, with most of it rightly focused on how to ensure academic integrity in an age of generative AI,” said Halda Co-Founder Dallin Palmer. “We’ve focused our efforts on making AI work for the mutual benefit of the student and the institution. The recruitment process is a perfect place to focus because there’s so much unnecessary friction. With AI Student Recruiter, we’re using technology to replace that friction with the kind of smooth and personalized experience younger generations have come to expect.”
In 2021 Halda was founded by a former Amazon engineer and Y Combinator alumni Lance Hydrick, Spencer Peterson, and Dallin Palmer. Halda currently serves more than 150 colleges and universities, with the Halda AI Enrollment Platform generating 97 percent gross retention last year and 92 percent positive student feedback across all institutional partners.
For more information, visit www.Halda.ai.
About Halda
Based in Provo, Utah, Halda is the first AI enrollment platform that unifies omnichannel 1-to-1 recruitment campaigns, websites, and CRMs for a personalized and scalable approach to student recruitment. Halda’s personalization platform offers a suite of AI-powered tools designed to engage and convert prospective students at any college, university, or other institution of higher education, saving precious resources and delivering a better experience to prospective students. Founded in 2021, Halda serves more than 150 higher education partners.
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