If you organise student recruiting events, you’ve probably had this problem:

You find a date that works for the hiring team. The speakers are available. Everything looks good.

And then you realise your target students are in exams. Or on semester break. Or it’s the week before the semester starts and nobody is paying attention.

We struggle with this all the time in the CareerFairy marketing team when scheduling and promoting Live Streams.

So we finally sat down, looked at the academic calendars of major STEM and business universities across Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and combined them with what we actually see when promoting events to students.

Here’s the simplified version so y’all can make use of it too.

🇩🇪 Germany: spring and autumn are your friends

Germany is probably the most complicated of the three because academic calendars vary significantly between universities — and particularly between traditional universities and Universities of Applied Sciences.

One thing our own event data has taught us: don’t assume January is bad. It can actually be a really good month for student events, particularly before exam preparation becomes the dominant focus.

February and March are much trickier. Many traditional universities are moving into exams and then semester break. Students haven’t disappeared, but if you’re organising a broad employer-branding event, we’d generally rather schedule it elsewhere.

Things improve quickly once the summer semester gets underway. From the second half of April through May, you have one of the strongest periods of the year. Students are back, university channels are active and there is plenty of career intent.

June starts getting slower, although events can still work. July is where we’d become much more cautious as exam season arrives.

And then comes summer.

August is generally a terrible time to organise a student event. Students are on holiday, doing internships or simply disconnected from university life. We’ve seen the occasional event work in August, but we wouldn’t build a recruiting calendar around the exceptions.

September remains inconsistent because universities restart at different times. The real sweet spot returns from mid-October through November.

The simple version: January can work surprisingly well. Be careful in February/March, go big from mid-April through May, avoid summer, and prioritise mid-October through November.

🇨🇭 Switzerland: the clearest calendar of the three

Switzerland is a little easier to plan around.

January and early February are dominated by exams at many universities, so they’re generally not our first choice.

But once the spring semester begins, things change quickly. From the second half of February through March, Switzerland is excellent for student events. Students are back, settled into their studies and reachable.

Easter creates a natural interruption around the beginning of April, but after that there’s another very strong window through April and much of May.

June becomes considerably harder as exams begin. And, just like Germany, summer is a period we’d generally avoid for Live Streams. Students might be doing internships, travelling or simply not paying much attention to university career communications.

The autumn semester brings the audience back. September improves quickly, and late September through November is one of the safest periods to organise events.

The simple version: February–May and late September–November are your big opportunities. Be cautious around Easter and exams, and don’t expect much from summer.

🇳🇱 Netherlands: watch the blocks, not just the semesters

The Netherlands has another system altogether.

Many Dutch universities organise teaching into shorter blocks, periods or quartiles. That means you don’t necessarily have one giant exam season — you have smaller examination periods appearing throughout the academic year.

The good news for employers is that this creates some very useful recruiting windows.

February and March are particularly attractive. Unlike at many German universities, there isn’t the same widespread long semester break, so students are generally studying and reachable.

April and May can also be strong, although public holidays and individual university examination blocks make picking the exact date more important.

June becomes considerably less attractive as final assessments arrive, followed by the same problem we see elsewhere: July and August are simply not months we’d recommend for broad student events.

Students return around the end of August and beginning of September, making September, early October and November particularly strong recruiting periods. Just keep an eye on shorter exam blocks, particularly around the end of October.

The simple version: February–March and September–November are your strongest bets. Check individual exam blocks, and avoid building your event strategy around summer.

The biggest lesson: “students are technically available” isn’t enough

Academic calendars are useful, but they don’t tell the whole story.

We’ve run enough CareerFairy Live Streams to know that a date can look perfectly fine on paper and still perform poorly.

When we’re deciding whether a date is good, we think about three things:

1. Are students actually studying or sitting exams?
2. Are they in a career mindset - applying for internships, graduate roles or their first job?
3. Can we actually reach them through university and CareerFairy channels?

And across all three countries, one pattern is pretty clear:

Summer is difficult.

There will always be individual events that perform well in July or August. But if you have flexibility, we’d much rather put your speakers in front of students when they’re back at university, thinking about their next career move and actually paying attention.

Your speakers being available is important.

Your students being available is even more important.