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How to Avoid Costly Graduate Hiring Mistakes

Stop playing games with graduate hiring and create an engaging experience that promotes your brand and attracts top talent.

Graduate Recruitment Requires Flexibility

We help lots of clients across the world with their graduate recruitment. And for many graduate and college recruitment teams, this past year has been – if nothing else – memorable. In today’s environment, whether your graduate hiring is virtual or live, remaining adaptable and flexible enough to adjust to any circumstance is critical.

And yet, there is a pain point that plagues HR teams every year – how to avoid the costly hiring mistake?

Indeed found that “on average, new graduates apply to 23 jobs before they get hired.” This can lead to recruiters sifting through lots of unsuitable applicants. To compound the issue, only 1 in 3 graduates believe they made the right decision when accepting a job offer.

Many recent graduates feel they made the wrong decision about their first place of employment. That kind of disengagement can be extremely costly — resulting in low productivity, high turnover, and potentially damage to your employment brand.

Many recent graduates feel they made the wrong decision about their first place of employment. That kind of disengagement can be extremely costly.

How to Attract and Hire the Best Graduate Candidates

Do not play games with your graduate candidates’ time by focusing on assessment methods that are not proven to work. Today’s grads do not have the time or patience for things that are not relevant. They want their job candidacy to be taken seriously—they too know that they are competing against many other students for any job.

Instead, your focus should be on enabling students to explore what an opportunity with your organization would be like by using real-life business challenges and scenarios.

Likewise, there truly is no ROI on unproven activities that might just be fun or look good on the surface, but lack precision and rigor. The result is that your graduates will not learn much about you, and vice versa.

Create compelling experiences that fully engage graduates and act as an efficient and effective quality filter. This can help you reduce unnecessary applicant volumes.

Watch our webinar replay on how to attract and hire the best graduate candidates.

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Author

Donna Weiss

Donna Weiss heads our Global Graduate and Managerial Solutions from our U.S. based Arlington, Virginia office. She has steered talent acquisition product initiatives since 2015, guiding the product development and growth of innovative hiring solutions that help companies hire the best talent. Prior to SHL, Donna spent over a decade at CEB, now Gartner creating HR product offerings and overseeing lines of business that serve Recruiting, Learning, and Talent Management executives and their teams. Prior to joining CEB, Donna held brand management and consumer and market insight roles at Unilever, and Marketing and Planning Systems (MaPS), now part of Kantar. She has been quoted and published in various publications including Talent Management Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Journal of Corporate Recruiting, and Chief Learning Officer magazine. Both her bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Labor Relations and MBA are from Cornell University.

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