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IN PURSUIT OF NEW COLLEGE GRADUATES
Companies share their experiences and results from the recently concluded college recruiting season.
WALK IN THE SHOES OF AN APPLICANT
Before you tinker with your process, look at it from the applicant's point of view.
TWO LITTLE WORDS
What words does your employer use to describe your contributions to the business?
CHECK THOSE REQUIREMENTS
Are your requirements real and valid, or arbitrary and discriminatory?
THE VALUE OF NETWORKING
It is all a matter of who you know.
At a recent meeting of the College Networking Resource Group, a special interest group in the DC/MD/VA
area, employers shared their concerns for how much time and effort it is taking to recruit college
graduates. Attendees, which included Lockheed Martin, Mobil, AMS, EDS, TRW, Bell Atlantic, Marriott,
Marconi and forty other companies, determined the acceptance rate of offers made to college students was
47 percent, down from 52 percent last year.
Despite the reduced acceptance rate, several companies indicated that they did not think it was as
competitive on campus this year as it was during the two previous years.
One good indicator of the effectiveness of corporate college recruiting programs is the screening ratio.
A comparison of the number of on-campus interviews needed to hire one student shows this year's effort
was significantly better than the past two years.
1998-99 Season 7 interviews 1 hire
1997-98 Season 9 interviews 1 hire
1996-97 Season 10 interviews 1 hire
There was a slight difference in results from the very large, well-established programs that hired
hundreds or even thousands of graduates to the smaller and newer programs that only went after a few
dozen. Large firms had a 6 to 1 ratio, while smaller firms ranged from 7.5 to 1 to 9.6 to 1. According
to the large, more experienced college recruiting firms, the keys to success are image recognition and
relationships. New corporate names and changing recruiters' faces definitely had a tougher sell.
Large programs visited 60 schools and hired an average of 562 graduates.
Medium programs visited 32 schools and hired an average of 70 graduates.
Small programs visited 10 schools and hired an average of 19 graduates.
Most companies that post jobs on their web sites only have job descriptions and standard data. College
students expect to be catered to and expect to find all the information they need to determine their
continuing interest on a corporation's web site. Many of the companies are still trying to upgrade their
web sites to make them college student friendly.
Students are using the Internet to do their homework prior to applying to or interviewing with a company.
They want to get a sense of the company's culture through pictures as well as testimonials from other recent
grads.
Some companies reported that they are finding it much harder to get their top
interns and coops to return for subsequent internships or as full time employees.
They have been taught to seek a variety of experiences in order to make themselves
more marketable, and more valuable, in the competitive marketplace. To combat
this, a few companies are offering signing bonuses or sweetening the offer package
with stock options for former interns.
If you have been listening to the stories current day job seekers are telling, most of Corporate America
still doesn't get it. In a high demand labor market, the applicant is the customer. But too many of us
continue to act like gate keepers, herding them like sheep through our cumbersome processes at our convenience,
not theirs.
Many who have tried to reinvent their employment processes have just created new
gauntlets for applicants to suffer. Perhaps we are too close to the forest to
see the trees. When we look at our processes from within our own shoes, we don't
see what the applicant sees or experiences. So, why not take a walk in the applicant's
shoes?
Before you tinker with your own process as an applicant, go out and apply to other
firms in your area or industry. Get yourself, and other members of your team,
invited to interviews with your competitors. See what they do to make you feel
special and wanted, and what they do to turn you off.
With an applicant's eye, evaluate the timeliness, responsiveness, friendliness, professionalism and
courtesy with which you are treated. Did you feel like a VIP, or just another person in a parade of
many? Did the interviewers make a special effort to tell you what you wanted to hear, or did they
just talk about themselves? Did they give you a chance to see where you would be working, who you would
be working with, and any of the amenities the company offers its employees, or did they just give you a
written description of these things?
By gaining the perspective of the real customer of your process, you should be able to make changes that
can significantly effect your fill times, recruiting costs, and acceptance rates.
Make Change Happen
It will take courage and conviction to make changes to a process that may have been in place for a long
time. There may be several people who will feel threatened by the changes you propose because, in many
cases, their roles in the process have provided them job security. Neither you nor your company can
survive in today's world maintaining the status quo.
As we see it, you have two choices: live with your old process and keep getting the same old paycheck
for a little while longer; or, change it and improve it and be recognized, rewarded and promoted for it.
In today's highly competitive recruiting environment, you will know if you are meeting or exceeding your
employer's expectations if you hear your senior management team use any of these two-word phrases to
describe you:
Adds value
Reduces cost
Improves quality
Saves time
Improves retention
Increases volume
It's hard to make a difference or make an impression if you just recruit. As these phrases
demonstrate, delivering results requires that you must also measure and report them if you expect
to get noticed.
Too often in these busy times, we find recruiters are blindly accepting the arbitrary selection criteria
handed to them by hiring managers.
The list of specifications typically calls for a specific college degree, major,
grade point average, skill set, and a minimum number of years of experience. In
the majority of cases, however, virtually all of these requirements are preferences,
and most have no direct correlation to successful job performance.
Technically, to be used as valid selection criteria, each requirement must be proven to be essential
to successful job performance, and without which, the employee would fail. We all know, however, that
there are many exceptions to these requirements who work in almost every job category. We have people
without degrees performing in jobs that we say require them. We have liberal arts majors in programming
jobs we say require a computer science degree.
Hiring managers will continue to tell us these requirements are mandatory unless
we challenge them. It is one thing to prefer to see only students who have a 3.0
GPA or higher, but to deny an otherwise acceptably qualified candidate because
he has only a 2.8 is discriminatory and indefensible.
It is always smart to start a new search with a face-to-face meeting with the hiring manager to explore
what knowledge, skills and abilities are truly needed to succeed in the job, and clarify which
requirements are real and which are just preferences. The more you know about the job and what it takes
to perform it, the easier it becomes to find a suitable worker to fill it.
As a recruiting professional in today's highly dynamic marketplace, it is very important to be actively
involved in all kinds of networking groups and associations. Whether your purpose is recruiting, professional
development, problem solving, or self-promotion, it truly is a matter of who you know.
To stay on top of recruiting trends, best practices and competitive issues, we
advise recruiters to join, or start, a local technical recruiters' networking
group. Also, for recruiters with national recruiting responsibilities, it can
be very beneficial to join and attend meetings of the Employment Management Association,
a professional emphasis group of SHRM.
In recruiting, we all quickly discover that connecting with the right candidates is often a matter of who you
know, and who they know. Referrals are the bread and butter of most successful recruiters, particularly in a
full employment marketplace.
Recruiters should also learn from the volatility of the market to prepare for the unexpected. Whether you are
an independent or a full time employee, your future growth and new job opportunities will most likely
result from the network of contacts you establish and maintain.
Anyone who has been in the job hunting mode in the past few years will advise you to - - get networked,
get noticed, and get ready to change jobs now because you will never know when you may have to.