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Attracting the best recruits
Attracting the best recruits
April 23, 2009
Last week I was helping a friend’s daughter with her application for a graduate internship in a prestigious organisation. In a discreet corner of the form, I read the ominous message: ‘Last year we received 3,000 applications for a similar position.’
This set me thinking: why do bright graduates so often gravitate to big corporates? Why aren’t they attracted to small businesses?
OK so we don’t have glamorous logos or universally-known straplines. And maybe we can’t compete on salaries. But if small companies are to be the engine of growth in post-recessionary Britain, we need to be able to attract the brightest and best.
In the face of dwindling graduate recruitment opportunities, students leaving university this summer are being encouraged to ‘take any job’. How gloomy. But this gives us small businesses an advantage. Rather than be the default choice (‘there’s nothing better’), we must market ourselves to show that we can and do offer exciting career possibilities, and that we provide those elements that any aspiring graduate will be seeking. It’s what you could call the TRIP factor.
Training: they will want to know that they will learn on-the-job
Responsibility: after years of study, they are eager to prove themselves in the real world
Initiative: you no doubt like recruits with the oomph that will help drive your business forward; if so, you will have to show that there are opportunities for them to use their initiative
Progression: and they would like reassurance that there is a future with you. It might not be a classic big-business ladder, but they need to know that recruits who show their worth will move up your organisation, sometimes faster and more effectively than in big businesses.
This is nothing ground-breaking, but it’s delivering the message (and living up to it) that’s the key.
So, I will tell my big-brand-chasing friend to refocus her sights, to broaden her lines of enquiry and to look to a sector where she will be able to get the TRIP of a lifetime!
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Comments
The idea of TheGradRoom is innovative and the concept of inbound marketing is smart. If it substantially reduces recruitment costs, and can target the appropriate graduate group, it should take off.
The appeal for graduates is clear. In my opinion, the main obstacle will be those recruiters who are yet to be convinced. And I suspect that could be a large group. But many have already emerged from paper ads to online recruitment sites, many of which are free, so, given a favourable cost-benefit analysis, this could be the next step.
Good luck!
Hi Alison,
You make some good points about small business' struggle to attract some of the top talent to their companies, even when the economic outlook suggests there should be plenty of high quality graduates desperate for work!
I think part of the problem for small companies is the cost involved in getting their company even onto the radar of any top graduates.
Whereas big name brands can throw money at recruitment websites, job boards and campus events, smaller companies generally cannot afford to do this, so need to find a more cost effective way of connecting with students.
This is the aim behind our website called thegradroom, I would love to hear your thoughts on the ideas of the company, based around the concept of inbound marketing. Do you think this will be a useful tool for smaller companies?
Ben Foulkes (TheGradRoom)
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