Recruiting New Graduates In A Candidate’s Market Unlike Any Other

When it comes to hiring and onboarding new employees, speed of hire and impactful onboarding are crucial.

 

We’re in the midst of a candidate’s market unlike any other. And, amid the fierce rivalry for top talent, businesses are soon confronting a new challenge: a massive flood of college graduates entering a fundamentally transformed workforce. The roughly 2 million new college graduates are defining and responding to the professional shifts of the last two years. Recruiting, employing, and onboarding graduates who are two years behind in socialization, having finished school at home or in a shelter-in-place situation is a new phenomenon in the job market.

This enormous incoming batch of graduates may feel exhausted and burned out in ways that past graduates did not. Graduates need and deserve a new degree of support as firms look to hire in a competitive economy, especially when they have little or no pre-pandemic work experience to influence their decisions.

 

The Great Resignation has been fueled in significant part by the millennial and Gen Z generations. They’re more empowered and willing to leave a job if their ideals and expectations aren’t met. Companies must compete in this candidate-friendly market by testing every area of their businesses, including their capacity to extend, simplify, and automate their candidate search processes. Companies’ recruiting tactics must start cultivating connections with outstanding individuals even before they graduate.

Candidates require and desire a variety of experiences. Candidates’ experiences must be great enough to attract talent – before others do – with open jobs considerably surpassing available workers. Business and professional services are reporting a half-million more positions than last year, with additional knowledge worker possibilities rapidly increasing.

 

Meanwhile, leisure and hospitality job opportunities have increased by 700,000 since winter 2021, and the trend is continuing across all hourly employee industries. With this in mind, companies must examine the best ways to achieve their hiring objectives for each set of candidates, beginning with their talent acquisition tactics and bearing in mind that they’re hiring a less experienced and potentially more stressed talent pool than in the past.

It’s crucial to link the applicant experience to promises of continued education and career advancement. The graduating candidate is searching for information on how a company will assist them with onboarding, job training, mentoring, and expanding their entry-level position into new prospects. These processes are no longer separated as “before” and “after” a hire; instead, savvy businesses are weaving a narrative so that candidates can understand the company’s values and how they will contribute.

 

Workers with expertise

Whether it’s dubbed the “Great Resignation” or the “Great Reshuffle,” companies that are willing to ask the tough questions see this current migration of talent and job seekers as the “Greatest Work Satisfaction Survey in History.” The past year has taught us that candidates want to feel connected to an organization and its purpose, and are willing to vote with their feet when their company’s values, vision, and work do not match their own or the job isn’t bringing in enough money.

Today’s graduate is seeking for a story about their preferred company that will help them find their way, not just acquire a job. To help them progress, they want a clear professional path, mentor programs, learning and development, and a transparent procedure. Forward-thinking businesses are constructing to suit this shifting demand.

This process must be automated and allow the individual to self-select into their career path due to volume and today’s competitive talent market. This increases employee trust, which is beneficial in talent recruiting. Employees frequently become an unofficial part of the recruiting process, with friends and previous coworkers identifying future prospects for roles they believe would be a good fit.

 

Personalization is also important when it comes to finding the right fit for knowledge workers, and AI-powered platforms can help feed a personalized story that each candidate needs to see and experience during their job search. On a career site, today’s graduates want the same hyper-personalized recommendations they get on Netflix or Amazon. They demand a personalized experience based on their actions and choices, and if they don’t get it promptly, they’ll go on.

That’s why AI is so important: clever chatbots ask a few simple questions to tailor the candidate experience. To keep candidates engaged and interested, a chatbot uses data from candidate responses to give relevant information such as company blog entries and employee testimonial videos, as well as personalized job recommendations.

 

Southwest Airlines’ success can be attributed to a solid referral program and an intelligent chatbot. Southwest reported 1 million chatbot engagements in a year, including:

• Personalization is available 24/7.
• Leads captured
• They saved 92,000 hours of time that would have been
• spent answering FAQs.

 

Employee recommendations have increased 700 percent as a result of the company’s incentive referral program, which is linked into a personnel experience management platform that automates emails and SMS about job openings. It also invites referred applicants to complete a candidate profile and join Southwest’s talent community. Additionally, the technology keeps employees informed about their referrals, allowing them to track a candidate’s progress.

Southwest engages referred applicants by hosting many weekly online “referral information sessions,” which allow the recruiting staff to reach out to a larger number of people at once while maintaining a personal relationship. Recruiters strengthen that bond by providing insight into the company’s interviewing processes and culture throughout sessions. Southwest receives an average of 1,000 referrals each week as a result of these efforts, with 50% of them completing comprehensive profiles and quickly converting from recommendation to applicant.

 

Hourly workers

Personal and professional innovation has been a constant for me. I led high-volume hiring of exceptional talent — more than 21,000 individuals per year – as EVP, HR at fitness firm LifeTime. In any high-volume hiring industry, especially in our current labor market, speed is critical. By optimizing talent acquisition procedures and involving recruiters and hiring managers at the proper time, automation helps drastically cut time-to-hire.

Although not always the first employment choice for college grads, I have found that recent graduates end up following an area of passion rather than pursuing a job directly connected to their degree. Retail and service roles often become transition opportunities that can lead to full-time work over time.

 

The new norm for the recruitment process — from the candidate’s initial click to receiving an offer — is as low as 24 hours in retail, logistics, and other high-volume employment areas. KinderCare Education, for example, has successfully used automation to satisfy greatly expanded employment requests. KinderCare is the largest childcare education provider in the United States, with almost 40,000 people working in over 2,000 daycare and early childhood education centers. Individual recruiting managers and recruiters at KinderCare were unable to keep up with the increasing volume of hiring requests as pandemic-related limitations were relaxed.

KinderCare was able to register, interview, and hire more efficiently by leveraging automation for its hiring events, putting less load on its two-person recruitment team. Candidate engagement and attendance rose as a result of automated advertising mixed with individualized pre-event communication from recruiting managers. KinderCare’s hiring team developed a template for a hiring event that was publicized on its employment site and managed automated email and text conversations with candidates in the build up to the event. As a result, In just over a week and a half, one single event resulted in 160 applications, 70 interviews, and over 40 hires for important roles – all for less than $50 in advertising.

When it comes to hiring and onboarding new employees, speed of hire and impactful onboarding are crucial. Without a platform that can reliably and quickly measure job fit and provide possibilities in large volumes, your organization risks coming last in the talent race.

 

Better recruiting through technology

This year’s grads have more job opportunities than any prior graduating class: 11.3 million jobs are currently available, up from 7.4 million in 2021. One of the most difficult challenges for graduates is figuring out where to begin combing through the numerous alternatives and narrowing their search to occupations they genuinely desire. In modern talent market, organizations only have 14 seconds to capture a candidate’s attention, so combining a robust platform with inspired and experienced recruiters and hiring managers is vital. We know this because we have over 350 million job openings on our platform and are always learning new things.

Companies must respond quickly, accurately, and individually. An AI platform’s automation aids in the streamlining of operations and the delivery of targeted messages that connect potential employees to the relevant prospects. That technology also allows recruiting teams the time and resources they need to be more human in the process, allowing them to focus their efforts on high-value actions and, as a result, bringing on the new individuals a company needs to flourish.

 

 

 

 

Source: https://www.benefitspro.com/2022/05/10/attracting-new-grads-in-an-unprecedented-candidates-market/