What Are Companies Doing To Attract Talent Easily?
As a manager, have you ever looked for someone with great potential?
Someone with enthusiasm and passion for the job?
Someone willing to do the grunt work and understand that every detail is important?
Who hasn’t?
But finding a candidate like this while reviewing tons and tons of applicants can be challenging and costly. What if we told you, you can attract candidates with these qualities easier, and that by having a certain program in place can ensure you get candidates looking for you rather than you looking for them.
What program are we talking about?
In larger corporations such as banks and international hotel chains, you might know them as graduate programs.Depending on the industry, in other business they can also be known as trainee programs, internships, apprenticeships etc. These words might bring to mind to you how they work - a placement on rotation in different parts of your business with different criteria and the opportunity for young people to get a foot in the door. In this week’s blog post, we look at graduate programs from the manager’s perspective and share a few of the benefits of having a graduate program in place for any organisation, however small, medium or large.
1. Low-cost Staff Resource
Interns are an inexpensive resource. Their salaries are significantly lower than other employees, and you aren't obligated to pay unemployment or a severance package should you not hire them on full time. Moreover, while their wage requirements are modest, they're among the most highly motivated members of the workforce.
2. Low-risk Commitment
Offering an internship or graduate position is a relatively low-risk way to attract new talent and skills in your business, with the opportunity for some of these newbies to turn their experience into long-term employment. It’s sort of an on-the-job-training, hands on example where you assess your intern’s potential and whether fit into your culture in a real world example. By offering graduate internships, you gain access to an ambitious workforce that is well-prepared for work. In this way, internships can give you an advantage over your competitors by helping you make better use of time, reduce your costs and be more profitable.
Did You Know?
According to the US National Association of Colleges and Employers' (NACE) 2009 Experimental Education Survey:
7% of 2007-08 interns were offered fulltime positions.
6% of these offers were accepted.
3% of employers' fulltime, entry-level college hires came from their internship programs.
80% of those employers who employ apprentices agree they make their workplace more productive
3. Mouldable
Graduates provide raw talent which can be shaped into targeted and focused employees who can make a long term contribution to the development of the company. As in our previous point, the program is a great indicator of their potential and ability to fit in with your organisation, and in this sense you can target early top performers and mould them in your organisation’s culture, groomed as a future leaders and permanent workers. Through training in different rotations you are able to assess them and see where they truly excel.
4. Opportunities to Mentor
Allows your existing team members to practice their leadership skills and review their ability to pass on information and encourage others in the organisation.
5. Networks that work for you
An internship/graduate program is a year-round recruiting tool and can allow you to have an ongoing pipeline of future fulltime employees. Moreover, universities campuses are viral societies. This means if your organisation impresses one class of interns/graduates, word will quickly spread.
6. Increased Productivity
Setting up an internship/graduate program allows you to take advantage of short-term support. The extra sets of hands help your employees be more productive, prevent them from becoming overburdened by side projects, as well as free them up to accomplish more creative tasks or those where higher-level, strategic thinking or expertise is required.
