10 Tips for Hiring Fresh Graduates for Your Business

Every time graduation season starts, it also marks the beginning of a new batch of eager young-lings seeking for employment. Hiring fresh graduates can be a tricky decision for every business since they have no prior experience working within an organization. There are also no criteria to evaluate their performance within a professional set-up. However, everyone has to start somewhere.

Actually, there are a lot of great reasons why you need to hire fresh graduates in your business. From their enthusiasm, to their new ideas, they can provide many benefits to your business. Fresh graduates are hungry for knowledge; given a proper training and guidance they can prove to be a viable long-term investment for your business.

Now, are you planning on hiring fresh graduates for you business? Here are some tips for finding, targeting, engaging, recruiting, and hiring top talents from the new class of college graduates.

1. Write a clear job description.
A clear job posting makes it easy for college graduates to understand the requirement needed for the position. The first thing you need to consider when writing a job description is to keep the language simple, since fresh graduates have less professional understanding of the occupation. A simple and clear wording will also help your message spread quickly and effectively.

Also, giving a direct message and organizing the elements of the posting to break down the key components will help job seekers understand the job requirements.

2. Look beyond the resume.
The reason why it’s a challenge hiring fresh graduates for your business is that, they don’t have any experience in the real professional world. While internships are important, they’re not everything—and having an internship is certainly not a guarantee that you’ll get a job offer and that doesn’t equate to actually being hired as an employee.

Relying on the achievements listed in their resume or how active they are in school organizations is not wise enough. Look beyond the resume, ask them about their experience doing their final thesis, how they manage their time being a working student, or get them to tell you stories about how they deal with pressures as a student, so you’ll have an idea how they will perform as an employee.

3. Evaluate the internship experience.
Internship program is the closest exposure a fresh graduate can have to an actual working environment. Fresh job seekers possessing a fair amount of time within a notable program indicate that they have made an effort to experience what it feels like to be in an office setting. Although their tasks may have been minimal, their experience in their internship program is still a major plus point.

To investigate their internship experience, call and talk to the person who supervised them to evaluate their performance and assess whether they became an effective and efficient intern/on-the-job trainee or not.

4. Narrow your research.
There are a lot of opportunities to gain actual job experience while in college. Find out how fresh graduates gained their experience and take note of it. Did they contribute to any online magazine? Have they won any award? Or did they become a part of a great startup idea? You may also look for their online portfolios to help you have an idea about the quality of the projects the job seekers have worked for in the past.

5. Check the attitude.
Fresh graduates might be lacking in experience yet they can be compensated by the element of individuality and fresh ideas. They should possess qualities reflecting creativity, good interpersonal skills, independence, honesty, and loyalty.

Beware of fresh graduates who don’t have the patience and persistence to be trained and be developed further. New graduates have the tendency to be choosy when it comes to work, as some of them may think that there are still a lot of other alternative jobs out there.

6. Focus on long-term growth opportunities.
Career development within the organization is a powerful incentive for potential fresh graduate employees. Mentoring programs and advancement opportunities are relevant to highlight early in the process, as gaining valuable job experience is a priority for the new members of the workforce.

Growth and learning in a workforce is the most attractive and have a high importance to new college grad job seekers. They still don’t have any idea what it feels like to be in a real world that’s why finding a job that will help them grow is what they are looking for.

However, you should remember that hiring any employee should give a value to your company. You should hire someone who will contribute to the profit generation and growth of your business, not only someone whom you would like to train and see his/her full potential.

7. Demonstrate how your company makes a difference.
Most fresh graduates want to do something meaningful in their first job. During the interview process, it is your opportunity to show how they can make a difference in your business. Be honest about your business strength and weaknesses, as well as the advantages of becoming a member of your company’s team. Also, show a candidate what it feels like to be part of it.

8. Choose passion over experience.
The best employees are the ones who are passionate about their company and will come to work every day excited. Find out what the candidate is passionate about. A long time passion shows dedication and commitment. Moreover, you should also see to it that the fresh graduates possess initiative and resourcefulness. Oftentimes, people who easily get bored are the ones who are not creative and do not know how to utilize the resources around them.

As inexperienced and first-time employees, you will have to invest a lot of time in supervising them. However, if you will hire fresh graduates who have initiative and resourcefulness, you can save more time and money.

9. Be prepared to help new hires succeed in their roles.
A fresh graduate adds many positive qualities in the workplace, but without proper support, the new employee lacks the experience required to work independently. Just be prepared to help the newbie as they start working. An orientation process with proper training and development is a crucial stage, but with patience, it will be invaluable to your long-term investment.

10. Take a reasonable risk.
Hiring fresh graduates can be cost-efficient and rewarding but also risky. Before you jump into employing new and inexperienced people as part of your team members, carefully assess your business first if it’s really the right decision. For big and established companies, fresh graduate employees can be beneficial. However, if your business is a startup which is not yet established, it would be wise to hire some experts since a company where its team is all newbies will more likely fail. Hence, make sure that when you hire fresh graduates, you have existing manpower or resources to manage and optimize them.

Businesses are made not only to make profit but also to make jobs and contribute to the whole economy. Profitability comes when there is productivity in your company. Therefore, if you think that hiring new graduates will be the wisest decision to increase productivity in your organization, then you have to put that decision into action as soon as possible.