How to plan an effective graduate recruitment strategy for long-term employment
Recruiting grads is the easy part, keeping them at your company is the challenge. By creating a solid graduate recruitment strategy you can attract the right kind of people and weed out the flaky job hoppers.
Although there are many real fears about hiring grads, they can be an incredible resource for any business. Whether you’re a start-up or international company graduates can offer invaluable insights, work ethic and creativity. You just have to find the right grad for you.
1 – Choose your style
Hiring comes with many options so before you post that job ad, have a think.
Are you wanting to try out a graduate for a short period of time before committing to long-term employment? Maybe an internship is right for you.
Are you providing lots of training and development? Looking for universities to promote the role? Consider advertising the opening as a graduate scheme.
Are you looking for an already confident graduate with some experience? Perhaps posting the role as a full-time entry level position is the way to go.
Job adverts can be unnecessarily confusing. If you use the wrong word, you can easily attract the wrong crowd.
2 – Set your guidelines
On the topic of job ads, the content of your vacancy posting cannot be overlooked. Consider the type of person you’re searching for and then lay out the role requirements, expectations and benefits.
The best thing you can do to set yourself up for a long, fulfilling period of employment is be honest. It’s easy to overlook some of the less attractive aspects of the role, but for the person you hire these will be glaringly obvious.
If your applicants know what to expect they are far more likely to enjoy their time.
3 – Test your applicants
By sending out a test at the second or third stage you really get to know your candidates on a new level. You’ll learn about their technical and creative skills in one go and be able to immediately assess whether they’ll be a good fit for your company.
This is a quick way to separate the apply-to-everything people from those that are passionate about the job and your company.
4 – Curate an airtight interview process
Interviews are a really valuable way to assess whether someone will be a good fit for your company.
Be sure to analyse their soft skills, technical expertise, attitude and whether they will fit into your company culture. Speaking of… is your tech company culture making candidates run away? ADD LINK
5 – Development opportunities
Many graduates are concerned with progression opportunities. Universities offer really quick development and results. You try harder, your grade goes up. In their first role they can be disappointed to not immediately get that recognition or promotion that they think they deserve.
So what can you do? To stop your grads from getting bored, make sure to offer progression opportunities. These can come in the form of upskilling, but can also be real role progression. For example internship to assistant.
This enables graduates to feel that they’re always working towards a goal and some sense of recognition.
6 – On-boarding and probation
We’ve already made a whole blog post about creating a powerful onboarding process and an effective probationary period. Both of these can quickly increase employee retention.
If you’re looking for more help, we have a free Onboarding Checklist that should set you up for success!
It’s especially important to focus on this process when working remotely, but the DigitalGrads team is here to help.
Are you sick of training new hires and seeing them leave only a few months later? Are you apprehensive about putting the time and resources into training flaky graduates? Our grads are the best of the best – we know because we train them ourselves. Take the leap into effective hiring today by signing up to our recruitment platform and advertising your new junior role.