How To Recruit Graduates

Recruitment 101- how to recruit graduates

Cohesion are experts in attraction, engagement, selection and assessment of Early Talent – from schools to social media, from assessment centres to on-boarding. Cohesion provide graduate recruitment outsourcing to ensure you recruit the best talent.

In an ideal world, your graduate would possess all of these characteristics, or a large proportion of them at least. As it is widely known that the quality of employees is directly related to the success and growth rate of any company. However with the war for talent so fierce in 2015, how do you attract the best candidates to your organisation?

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With statistics highlighting a falling birth-rate in early 2000’s there will likely be a shortage of graduates approaching 2020-2025. This means employers have to be on the ball when it comes to their attraction plan.

However, the graduate market has been described as fickle– what’s hot one year might not be so hot the next, and you find yourself losing out on the best candidates to your competitors, who have kept up with the new talent trends.

So, how do you make sure you attract the best applicants for your job or vacancies and retain them for long enough to contribute to the future success of your company?
Read on to find out how to recruit graduates.

1. Winning the ‘War for Talent’

Limiting yourself to the 2.1 and over brigade, which makes up 68% of the market, could in fact be limiting your search options and consequently mean you’re missing great people.

Firstly you need to decide what defines talent. Take a peek at the job roles in today’s society and it seems that everyone is talented, we have Talent Managers, Talent Specialists and Talent Acquisition Advisors… the list goes on… but how many of those people actually have a talent?

Generally, within the graduate market, a candidate with a 1^st or 2.1 is the required benchmark. However, have you ever looked deeper into an application form? You might find that the candidate with a 2.2 also had 2 part-time jobs, was dedicated to a sport and a job placement. That’s great, right?

If you’re using your intern programme correctly, it should act as pipeline for young talent. Hiring this way will also be filling roles with candidates that have worked hard and proved that they are worthy of the position. Plus you have gained extra time to see if they fit within the culture of your organisation, which is an important factor that should be considered.

2. Candidate Engagement

Engagement throughout the process is key, graduates are likely to have more than one application in process at any one time and their future career decisions are based on how they’re treated throughout their journey. So remember contact, contact and more contact.

With technology influencing many factors it is vital that you are up to scratch with methods of communication, whether it’s making your application mobile friendly or engaging with candidates on social media.

It’s where they all hang out, so the chances are your attraction will be stronger here; plus it gets your employer brand out there with retweets, shares and hashtags taking over – the social media buzz is the next step to success and will help you reach an even wider pool of talent.

3. Are you as attractive as you think?

The graduate market is now candidate led and it’s up to the employer to make sure their package is more attractive than the competition. Therefore, it makes sense to find out what graduates want from an employer and factoring this into the scheme:

Pierre Berlin, Senior Director, LinkedIn Talent Solutions has found that there are 5 factors at the forefront of the graduate wish list:

1. Good work to life balance
2. Relevant and competitive reward
3. Strong career path
4. Challenging work
5. Pride in where they work

4. Boost mentor-ship and training.

Ensuring that your business has a strong culture will help retain your talent. It is also important that you have a career path and plan set up for the graduates.

By developing a strong training and mentor-ship program at your company — yes, even at a small company — you will have a much greater chance of drawing in recent graduates. This helps with job security for graduates and also has the added bonus of reassurance for existing employees that ‘leapfrogging’ will not occur as the graduates have their own pathway to follow.

Overall it will provide you with more engaged and motivated employees who are invested in your company for the long run.

Are you thinking about recruiting graduates? Click here to find out what Cohesion can do for you.