How to Attract Graduates to Your Company
Young, bright and bursting with enthusiasm, fresh graduates often make excellent employees. Unfortunately, the younger demographic has a highly defined set of generational workplace preferences that may make it hard for some companies to tap into their labor. If yours is one of them, here are four things you can do to start drawing in more of that promising new talent now.
Invest in Technology
It may be hard to predict exactly what jobs will be in demand in the future, but it's a safe bet that they will involve high levels of technology. Tech is everywhere these days, particularly in the lives of the younger workforce. They are intimately familiar with what it can do, and they expect to be able to use it to the fullest possible extent in their professional lives too.
This is especially important to grads working in positions like web designer or video production assistant - these professionals can't hope to do their jobs properly using only old desktop computers from 1995. Whether it's newer everyday technology like smartphones and laptops or specialized side equipment like drone cameras or 3D printers, any business can always benefit from a tech upgrade. Not only will these new toys impress young potential employees, but many of them also provide significant cost-saving potential if properly leveraged. In other words, it's a smart financial move you should be making anyway, so get going!
Outline Paths for Advancement
Once upon a time, you would often start and end your career at the same company, gradually moving up the ranks as you grew older. Millennials are facing a radically different job market, though, and they know it. One of the main reasons for changing jobs in this age group is to seek opportunities for a promotion. This is because jobs for new graduates rarely offer much in the way of a career ladder.
If you can make your company's entry-level positions different, they will immediately become far more attractive to young job seekers. It should be noted that this strategy also works to increase retention. Your new hires will have one less reason to look elsewhere as they advance in their careers, making it more likely that you will be able to depend on them for years to come.
Provide a Modern Workspace
We all know what an old-fashioned office looks like, but that traditional design has come under fire by newer entrants to the workforce. Cubicles are particularly maligned, with many critics pointing out that they create a dehumanizing, stifling environment that limits employees instead of supporting them. That's not what anyone wants in a workspace, especially young people.
Newer office buildings tend to abandon this pretense of privacy and opt instead for wide-open designs with a lot of transparency in the space as a whole. There's usually plenty of glass on display, and bright colors are used to visually separate different spaces without the need of a physical barrier. The idea is to promote openness and collaboration as much as possible. Let’s take a virtual tour of Orange Digital office for a good example of what you should be aiming to create.
Offer Flexibility
New graduates crave flexibility in their work more than just about any other perk. They know it's perfectly possible to go run errands or attend their niece's dance recital right now, then get back to work later when their outside obligations have been handled - the Internet has made time physical presence a non-issue in most of the white collar world.
Flexibility means more than just the ability to telework from time to time, though. It can also include things like the ability to drop to part-time hours (typically at part-time pay, of course) when needed, more vacation time, options for longer sabbaticals every few years, and other policies that give workers more freedom to live a life outside the 9-to-5 grind.
