Graduate Recruitment: Evolving Your Team At The Speed Of Technology

If you are in the market to hire a new graduate or expanding your business on a larger scale, then you are probably interested to know how you can evolve your team efficiently. By providing training and development opportunities for your employees, you are improving the quality of your company, while also reducing staff turnover.

In case you are hiring graduates, this article will explain how you can attract top talent, help them progress and make sure they stay at your company for the long haul.   

How to build an effective talent pool

As the perfect candidate isn’t always easy to come by, you have to be proactive in your search.  Creating a talent pool is an effective way to fill your job vacancies with long-lasting, high quality candidates. Due to this being a long-term recruitment strategy, hiring graduates can sometimes be the best solution. With graduate recruitment, you are gaining access to dedicated individuals who have spent a minimum of three years studying for a degree. Eager to impress, graduates will carry this same attitude forward to their new workplace. What they might lack for in professional experience, graduates will make up for with an endless list of fresh ideas in how your business can be improved.

Now you know the benefits of hiring graduates, you may be left asking yourself how you go about attracting the best talent.

Company reputation

To build an effective talent pool and attract top candidates, your company needs to have a strong reputation. Without a good reputation, you will lose top talent to your industry competitors. To build your all-important reputation, you need to be able to deliver a consistent experience to both your clients and employees.

Social media presence

As graduates are comfortable with technology, they are likely to be active on social media. With each social media platform having a huge audience, you have the ability to reach potential candidates online.

While, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram might not be considered appropriate platforms to source employees from, they remain a productive way to build your brand and engage with the public. When it comes to LinkedIn you have more of a professional platform, which allows you to share frequent updates with your followers.

How to develop top talent

After successfully hiring the most talented graduates, you need to guide them through their development to ensure that your team evolves to its full potential. While, you might be unsure of how to do this, the next section of this article will suggest some things that you can do, to develop the talent of a graduate.

Training

With the training services Pareto provide, you have a brilliant opportunity to develop your graduates’ skillset. By investing in training courses for members of your team, you are directly supporting them in the early stages of their career. Graduates who receive this help, are far more likely to stick around and continue their progression at your company. Therefore, by simply putting your employees through training courses, you are positively influencing the chances of your business succeeding in the future.

Mentor

To further support their training and development, you can assign each graduate with a mentor. By exploring the potential of training courses and their career aspirations, you can connect more effectively with your employees. 

Mentoring doesn’t necessarily need to be conducted in a one to one setting. In fact, managers can communicate helpful strategies to encourage development on a more frequent basis.

Delegate

You can make considerable progress in developing your graduates by delegating tasks. These should be tasks that are challenging, or prompt them to try something new. Delegation shouldn’t simply be classified as the handing over of tasks. Instead, it should be an engaging process whereby, you communicate your expectations and provide regular feedback. Over time, your new employees will be able to take on more responsibilities, helping them to grow in confidence and improve their performance.   

How to retain top talent

Even when you have made the great effort of attracting and developing top talent, you need to ensure that you have a working environment in place that retains your employees. The following sections will give you an idea of how you can keep your employees happy, and maintain an element of consistency at your company.

Company culture

A key part of retaining your employees is having a strong company culture. Although, it can be challenging to pinpoint exactly how a company forms a positive culture, there are some general pointers to follow. 

Firstly, a great culture should revolve around having a mission and vision, which is what a company does on a daily basis, and where they see themselves in the future. This will give the employees a clearly defined purpose when they are completing their day to day tasks.

A company must also have a clear set of values, which can be adopted to maintain standards and achieve the mission and vision. However, if the actions of a company don’t match their vision and values, then the culture will weaken. Therefore, a good culture will be backed up by strong leaders, who set an example, and embody the company mission, vision and values with everything they do. A strong culture will positively influence how a company is perceived, meaning that employees are far more likely to stay.    

Career progression

Over the course of their education and early working career, many of your employees will have become accustomed to progressing. As they settle in at your company, there is no reason why they can’t continue to develop.  

While, you might think that providing good salaries and competitive benefits packages is enough, your more talented employees might have ambitions to go further.

That’s where Pareto can help. With Pareto’s training services you are providing your employees with growth and learning opportunities. By investing in their development, employees will feel valued and as a result, are more likely to stay at your company for longer.