6 Ways to Accelerate Graduate Recruitment

New graduates are enthusiastic, motivated for their goals, and ready to take on new challenges. Hiring graduates can be valuable to your organization. If you’re willing to fill open positions in your company with fresh new employees, graduate recruitment is a no-brainer. According to the Job Outlook 2023 report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers planned to hire 14.7% more new college graduates in the year 2023 compared to the previous year. Creating strategies for recruiting graduates is crucial to ensure your company remains competitive in the job market. For campus recruiting, companies visit some of the country’s top universities and colleges. The planning needs to start many months before to ensure you get ahead of the competitors.

In this guide, we’ll talk about key challenges and some creative strategies to ensure smooth graduate recruitment for your company.

The Key Challenges in Graduate Recruitment

Recruiters in the US are spending more time than ever to find the best graduates. It’s not as simple as providing jobs at career fairs anymore. The entire process of offering graduates jobs in the US has become complex. Let’s take a look at some of the challenges you may experience when recruiting graduates.

Limited Work Experience

Graduates with little to no experience may not have the necessary skills that are required for a job, resulting in a need for you to provide training. As a recruiter, you generally assess a candidate’s stability and adaptability by seeing their records. With no work experience, it becomes challenging for you to identify if the candidate will be able to adapt to the demands of a professional workspace.

Lack of Soft Skills

Both technical and people skills are important for a job. Students gain skills and experience from university lectures and interactions with fellow students and professors, but with increased competition, this has changed. A lot of graduates get their experience through part-time work or summer jobs while many don’t. Soft skills are essential in technical roles. Developers, for example, must do more than write code; they need to be creative, meet deadlines, collaborate with teams and stakeholders, and understand end-users perspectives.

Higher Turnover Rates

Hiring recent graduates can be expensive for companies. You have to spend money on interviews, training, and finding new employees, which can strain your budget. High turnover rates also disrupt teams, leading to unhappy team members who have to adapt to frequent changes. High turnover rates can hinder a stable and productive work environment, as well as deter top graduates who may view the organization as unstable or unappealing.

Additional Reading: How to Manage a High Volume of Applicants with Video Interviewing

Six Strategies for Accelerating Graduate Recruitment

1. Attend Career Fairs

Universities and colleges regularly host career fairs that help students find entry-level employment. Create a list of universities and colleges near your workplace that organize such events. Use them to advertise your open job vacancies. At job fairs, you’ll meet candidates from different backgrounds, making these events perfect for finding diverse talent. It could be a great way to recruit as you can screen, interview, and assess candidates in one place. You should consider organizing an industry-specific job fair to enhance your brand image among job seekers. Creating an attractive booth with the help of banners, displays, and images that represent your company positively is the best way to graduate job marketing. Make sure you choose team members who are best at attracting applicants, be they HR managers, recruiters, or other team members. Offering giveaways or promotional materials can attract applicants.

The most important thing you could do is contact every promising candidate after the job fair with the help of emails or phone calls to show that you’re interested. Ensure you have maintained a strong online presence as many employees check it after they’ve attended the fair.

2. Social Media Recruiting

Technology is essential to reaching Gen-Zers, with most students active on social media websites such as TikTok and Instagram as part of their everyday lives. These channels allow your IT recruitment strategy to reach them more directly and spread the word about any vacancies available to candidates within your pipeline. Recent graduates tend to prioritize companies that reflect their beliefs and preferences. Social media allows you to present your company via photos, posts, videos, testimonials from employees, and more. Students frequently search for internships and entry-level jobs on social media as a means of starting their careers. Posting information regarding them can attract talented young individuals looking to expand their careers.

Social media provides an engaging platform to conduct interactive recruitment campaigns like contests, challenges, and virtual career fairs for career opportunities. Such events create excitement among students and make the recruitment process way more engaging. Organize a coding competition or design competition for tech students or creative professionals and utilize social media strategically to engage recent graduates into your business and encourage them to join your organization.

3. Text Message Recruiting

Text messaging enables you to reach out to candidates faster and engage with them in a personalized way. Gen Z graduates are much more likely to communicate via text messages as compared to traditional emails. If you want to instantly send text messages to potential candidates, consider a platform like Jobma. Additionally, invite them to conduct a virtual interview on their smartphones so that they don’t have to physically visit the office location. Creating engaging and personalized text messages, like mentioning their names, can be a great way to make your organization stand out from the crowd. You can also add an enticing call to action to every text message you send, be it an invitation to apply for a job role or scheduling an interview.

With the help of automation, send reminders for application deadlines or interview dates to maintain an efficient communication flow. Demonstrate your commitment to candidates’ long-term success by periodically sending text messages with career development tips and ideas.

4. Offer Internships

An internship provides candidates with the opportunity to actively participate in real-world work experiences, enabling them to acquire practical skills and knowledge within a professional environment. To maximize recruitment for graduates via internships, it is crucial to develop a program with well-defined tasks and roles tailored specifically to the requirements of your business. Offering competitive benefits and compensation will attract top talent by showing your commitment to their professional growth. Collaboration with educational institutions or strategically recruiting interns could result in excellent candidates.

Additionally, identifying and training high-performing interns who may become full-time hires after the completion of the internship will be a plus point. By soliciting feedback from both interns and supervisors about your program and continuously making improvements to it, you can increase its success in providing highly skilled students for your business.

5. Design an Interview Process for Graduates

To start, make sure you clearly describe the job and what you’re looking for in new graduates in the job posting. Use an ATS to filter out applicants who don’t meet the basic requirements and focus on those who seem to be a good fit.

Pick a video interview platform with an asynchronous video interview feature where candidates can respond to some standard questions on video within a specific time frame. This helps you fairly judge their skills and qualifications. For those who do well in the pre-recorded interview, you can then conduct a live video interview and maybe some tests if needed to check their technical skills. Make sure you keep communicating with candidates and analyze data to ensure that the process works well.

6. Prioritize Employer Branding

If you’re willing to accelerate graduate recruitment, focusing on the employer brand is vital. Adopt innovative strategies other than the traditional approaches to meet the requirements of fresh graduates. You can use platforms like TikTok and Snapchat to highlight your company culture creatively. Creating a short, fun, and creative TikTok video that showcases your company’s work environment or team activities is a great way to attract recent graduates. Integrating gamification elements into your recruitment process also adds an interactive touch. For example, if you want to hire a person for your sales team, you can ask them to develop a sales pitch for a particular market. This can help you assess their creativity and strategic thinking and they will enjoy the hiring experience too.

Additionally, you can strengthen your employer brand with the help of job adverts, brochures, interviews, and throughout the recruitment process.

Conclusion

Recruitment of recent graduates plays an essential part in shaping organizations in today’s dynamic job landscape. This article has explored five strategies designed to help you in your hunt to attract and retain top graduate talent. By hosting career fairs, utilizing social media tools, text message recruitment, meaningful internship programs, and optimizing the interview process, you can tap into an abundance of highly motivated graduates. You cannot only overcome recruitment hurdles but also drive organizational success within an increasingly dynamic job environment.

Additional Reading: Technology for Recruiting Millennials and Gen Z