Hire a graduate: Attract the Best College Talent

If attracting recent university graduates to your company is part of your hiring plan, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that your mail system is working and you got the memo about how much value is being created by new talent in the workforce. The bad news is that you're competing with a lot of other companies for that recent graduate talent. How do you make yourself stand out to often younger talent without resorting to stunts and gimmicks?

You can start by reading the suggestions below on how to make your company appeal to the top-of-the-class graduates streaming into the workforce.

1. Make Yourself Visible

Today's graduate job seekers went through university during one of the grimmest eras in the job market, making them a class of people that has consumed a lot of content about where to market themselves for the job market. They have learnt that jobs come can be found all over the place, from traditional spots like a company's website to social media – like a simple mention on Twitter. And with increasingly specialized job websites emerging, they often zero in on those as more geared toward their needs. This all translates to your company needing to be visible in a meaningful way at all of the digital touch points where ambitious graduates search. Not just by posting your job but by guest-blogging, speaking at relevant industry events to make your brand's voice apparent and using social media to promote company growth as part of your regular social media communications. All of these make you look like you're doing more than posting jobs, you're engaging in relevant digital spaces. Also don't forget the power of engaging with universities – placement years, internships and careers fairs can all get you in front of these talent guys and girls pre-graduation and before a lot of your competitors do!

2. Be Authentic

Plenty of companies fall flat when they attempt to be cooler than they are to appeal to often younger demographics. You don't need to have the hippest office and the best-looking staff of go-getters to attract top talent from the latest crop of graduates. But you do have to demonstrate that you're a company with solid values that believes in its core product or service and a place where graduates can grow and develop their career. And you have to prove that you're really interested in these graduate candidates as complete people, not just a source of less expensive but highly skilled labour. Of course, having fun and unique perks can often help set you apart from your competitors too.

3. Deemphasize Age

So the majority of new graduates are going to be young, but guess what? Young people know they are young. This often comes with lack of work experience. Make an effort to showcase your appreciation for the talents and experience that your existing young talent brings to the table rather than emphasizing precisely how much they have to learn. If you build a reputation as a company that cares more about the value that employees are adding rather than the years they're accumulating on the job, you will be more likely to grab the attention of young graduates eager to prove themselves in an environment that recognizes their potential rather than their limitations. However it is important to acknowledge that not all recent graduates come straight from school age – so you need to ensure that your recruitment processes is also aligned in attracting graduates who may have had a few years out or went to university later on in life.

4. Commit to Great Communication

Today's graduates are a generation of communicators and being an employer that understands the value of communication (both ways!) will put you in good stead for this generation.. By making yourself available via multiple technologies that were once reserved for personal use, you also make yourself more relatable to this generation. Engage graduates in your hiring process – get they in for a coffee, use Skype, video interviewing or even do some working interviews. The more personal touch points you have in your hiring process the more engaged potential hires will be. A lot of companies get 100s of applications for just one post and often don't respond to applications. So graduates can get quite disheartened. So be different! Even once you have offered the role, keep in touch with that person before they start – call them up a few days before they start, invite them to company social events. You can guarantee that graduates often have loads of interviews and could still be going to them even once you have offered. If you treat them well once you have offered and engage them in your business – guess what? They are less likely to take another offer!

5. Demonstrate Long-Term Interest

Many employers read stories about how young workers are notoriously hopping from job to job and make the mistake of expressing limited or short-term interest in graduates. But the truth is that much of the jobs recovery has been in part-time or temporary work, discouraging recent graduates that want to lay down roots at a company and help it grow. Sure the rise of short term (often poorly paid) internships that don't lead to permanent jobs has had an impact on this perception. So having a clearly defined permanent role (even if it starts with an internship period) will demonstrate to graduate talent that you are willing to invest in the long term and that they will be trained and developed. Internships that don't lead anywhere or where communication is not had around where it could go, makes graduates feel expendable and guess what? Yep, they will be looking elsewhere!

A company culture and structure that demonstrates that you view new graduate hires as assets worth investing in will draw the best of them to your company.

These are just 5 things you should consider, but there are many more. So make sure you engage an expert HR Consultant to streamline this process to ensure you get the cream of the crop when it comes to new graduate talent!

Hiring an Intern? Have a look here

Industries like fashion and finance are infamous for hiring interns. Can start-ups also benefit from hiring students? The answer is a resounding "yes," whether you choose to offer internships for a few weeks, or months at a time.

Interns provide high-value, low-cost talent and fresh perspective. Accordingly, the interns' scope of work can (and should) go beyond stereotypical coffee making. By hiring interns, you can expand capacity for new projects or find students who bring new skills, such as graphic design, to your team.  While ambitious students lack the experience of full-time employees, they genuinely want to learn and excel.

Designing an internship position

So how do you get started? First, consider the following logistics as you design the position:

Ø  When will the internship occur? Full-time internships commonly occur during summer break, but you could also offer part-time positions during the fall or spring semesters. Make sure that a current employee has the capacity to mentor and manage the interns' work during this period.

Ø  What level of commitment do you expect? Describe your requirements in time (days or hours per week) or key duties, such as managing your social media or achieving sales goals.

Ø  Is the location flexible? Traditional internships usually require face-to-face interaction, but long-distance roles provide greater flexibility to attract more students. Will there be any travel required?

Ø  What skills are required? Before enlisting an intern, determine whether you expect specific skills from day one, or if students can receive training and learn on the job. Be clear about whether you need an iOS developer, someone with a mastery of Microsoft Excel, or both.

Ø  What is your goal for the outcome of the internship?  Do you want to find aspiring entrepreneurs who are interested in gaining short-term experience, or candidates who are looking for full-time job opportunities?  If you're looking for the latter, focus on hiring students who will graduate sooner.

The next step is finding applicants. Recruiting for undergraduate or MBA internships typically begins three- to five months in advance, although many students look for last-minute positions. Attracting great applicants is a lot like real estate: location, location, location. After outlining the position's basic criteria, you can publicize your internship in a variety of ways. Here are a few effective methods:

·         Submit a job posting to a college's career centre or post a message on the campus's virtual job board. A university-branded site feels more credible than open forums like Craigslist, and helps attract high-quality talent during the recruiting cycle.

·         Contact on-campus organizations, such as a consulting club or the college's entrepreneurship centre, with a description of the position and your contact information. If the location is convenient, you could offer to attend a meeting in person.

·         Utilize local or national start-up-focused sites to broadcast the internship opening. While this may not reach as many eyeballs as a campus-wide ad, proactive students monitor these sites and will follow up.

·         Reach out to your network, specifically contacts such as adjunct professors at local universities.  They can recommend outstanding students or share your contact information with their classes.

Recruiting provides a great way to develop on-campus brand recognition. If your start-up hires full time employees, internships develop a pipeline for finding new hires. After assessing students' skills through the internship, companies can easily extend full-time job offers to top performers. While hiring an intern takes time and effort, the benefits easily recoup the costs if you plan for an intern well.

Before Signing an Employment Contract...

Getting a new job is exciting. But before you start work, your employer may require you to sign an employment contract covering your compensation, working conditions and termination pay you if you are fired. If you do not fully understand what you sign, you could be in for some nasty surprises later.

So here are the top things to focus on before you sign a contract of employment.

Job title and responsibilities

This is important because it defines the scope of what your exact role is, and what duties your employer can or cannot require you to do. The wider the job description, the more flexibility your employer will have to require you to take on more work, changing the goalposts. You should check that the job description adequately reflects the role you are applying for, and does not look to impose added responsibilities that you can't or don't want to do. Also check that the job title is correct.

Place of work

If you have agreed to work in a wide geographical area, your employer will be in a strong position if you object to a move at a later stage. If working remotely at home is a possibility and something you have discussed, then the contract should reflect this. Also, your rights to a redundancy payment could be adversely affected if you refuse to work in a new location, having previously agreed in your contract to do so.

Salary, benefits and bonuses

Make sure your employment contract reflects what was in your offer letter. You need to check there is provision for payment of other benefits that have been agreed, such as an enhanced pension, car, private health cover, equity or share options, bonuses and commission payments. Check if bonuses are guaranteed or discretionary. If based on performance, there should be set targets and an understanding of who decides whether the objectives have been met.

Hours of work

Don't agree a working pattern that you will later regret. It's best to negotiate a variation at the outset if necessary, including the possibility of flexible working if this is the only way you can get the job done. As well as hours of work, check whether there are any shift patterns, including whether you are required to work weekends or evenings, and if so, for what days and for how long? Also check if you are being asked to "work all the necessary hours that the job entails", and if so what is expected. Also check if you're required to do overtime, and if you will be paid for this.

Holidays

You cannot take holidays at the time of your choosing, so if you are limited as to when you can take them, this should be addressed with your employer. Whether you are prevented from taking holidays at certain times of the year. Or there is an entitlement to roll over any untaken holiday into the following year.

Notice

Check your notice is not unduly long or short. For most employees a notice period of one to three months is usual. A notice period that is too long could hamper you being able to take up a new job, and too short a period may not give you enough stability.

Why working remotely makes sense

Flexible workplaces are fast becoming the go-to style of high-performing companies to get serious results from their employees while also building more trust in the employers themselves.

It is tempting in a small business or start-up to have an "all hands on deck" mentality but the reality is that working from home can add more value to your company than a perfect attendance record up and down the employee roster.

Here are five reasons why.

Building Trust & Accountability

When a company entrusts its employees to get their work done from home, they are essentially saying, "We know you know how to do your job and don't need us looking over your shoulder to do it." This is a tremendously important message for employees to hear and it is one that they do not take lightly as an opportunity to squander time whilst no one is watching. Instead, they want to earn and maintain the trust they've been given with stellar work performance and visible metrics of success that demonstrate their seriousness about being accountable to the company.

Creating Higher Quality Office Time

When you have employees working remotely, everyone knows that their time in the office is precious and will be ready to bring their personal bests to both formal and informal engagements with their colleagues. No more mind-numbing presentations or hollow small-talk at the water cooler. Employees that see one another less frequently will be more excited to catch up in person and will be more able to appreciate the value that their colleagues are adding when they do engage in person.

Developing Talent Diversity

The fewer geographical and demographic limitations your company has, the more quality candidates you can pull in from around the globe if you so desire. You can expand as near or as far as will fit your company's, with some opting to keep employees only in the immediate vicinity of the primary office so that employees can come in at least a few times weekly and others employing a global workforce whose faces they'll only see via Skype. It will depend on what your company can handle, of course, but giving opportunities to workers that might not otherwise be able to be present in the office adds real value. Maybe there's a brilliant accountant who happens to need to be home with his children three days a week. Maybe the best coder for your website performs her best work from the comfort of her own home. The list of opportunities missed by having everyone present during work hours every day is virtually endless.

Saving Money & Time

Stop for a moment and think of how much your company spends on property and utilities in a given month. Consider the possibility that half of that cost could be eliminated if you allowed people whose jobs don't require regular face-to-face meetings to work from home. Then take a moment to think of how much time is spent getting your entire team to work its ways into an all-staff meeting or for everyone to clear out of the office at night so that the office manager can go home. Having fewer bodies in the office decongests both your company's bills and the lines at the coffeemaker, and that all leads to lower costs and fewer headaches.

Launching a Culture of Innovation

In the absence of the traditional and formal lines of communication and collaboration, you and your team will have to innovate and discover new ways of doing business. Perhaps that means investing in a new cloud-computing program that makes file-sharing easier. It could be a re-evaluation of how calls are conducted. There are loads of ways that working in different places is going to make the initial stages of a flexible workplace a challenge. But that challenge is actually an opportunity to discover new ways of thinking about your business, propelling it into the future both with the technology it employs and the way it understands the diverse human experiences within the company.

If remote working is something that you are considering in your business, talk to an HR Consultant. We can help make this process seamless, by ensuring you have considered and covered all the practical issues i.e. insurances, security, the contractual changes that need to be undertaken, as well as your Health & Safety obligations i.e. home risk assessments.

Low-Cost Ways to Show Employees They're Highly Valued

Small and mid-sized companies sometimes feel they'll never compete with their mammoth corporate counterparts because they can't afford expensive benefits and perks like long weekend leadership retreats and family health care. But those huge companies don't have the opportunity that small businesses do to tailor their perks and appreciation to the individual employees.

Below are ten low and no-cost ways you can show your appreciation without breaking the bank.

       Giving employees more opportunities to build their work hours and days in the office around their lives makes them loyal, productive, and more certain that you're committed to their needs.

       If someone has been putting in extra effort consistently on team projects and delivering results, ask them what they'd like to be next on their list of projects and assign them a leadership role.

       Lots of employees feel that their colleagues don't really know how hard they're working or even what they do. By scheduling regular meetings with no agenda but sharing the progress and ongoing work of your employees, you demonstrate their value to the entire team.

       Don't wait for your team to hit a sales goal or for a holiday to roll around to show that you care that they're engaged, schedule a party in the middle of the week and let the team know that it's happening in advance so as not to interrupt anyone's work day.

       With smart phones and the editing tools pre-installed on most computers, you can make a quality video without professional help in no time. Instead of the standard "Thanks for your hard work," ask employees what their favorite memory of the employee you're recognizing is to get more unique and varied answers.

       Let every employee have one day per week where they can choose to either roll in later than usual or head out early. As long as work gets done, it should be no problem and employees will love the choice.

       Based on the goings-on at the company, come up with clever awards and titles around the inside jokes and events that your employees experience. Titles like "Most Likely to Take the CEO's Job" can go to the highly ambitious person while, "Most Likely to Drink the Last of the Coffee" to your resident caffeine fiend.

       Even if you only have a coffee pot and a box of biscuits, letting an employee whose work you want to recognize pick the brands for a designated period of time will make them feel appreciated and heard at the office.

       While everyone can't rush to add "Chief" to their title, having a conversation about what employees want their next title to reflect about their skills and the work they're doing lets them have more control of their career trajectory than the traditional job hierarchy that is already set up with titles.

       Sometimes even more exciting than taking on a dream project is unloading a nightmare one. If you want to recognize an employee as doing solid work, free them from their most taxing work project. The relief and gratitude will last much longer than the pain of having to do the project yourself.

Workplace wellbeing: Motivate Good Employees to Become Better Employees

Almost all employees want to do interesting work, secure a good salary and earn recognition for their contributions. But motivating employees takes more than money. It requires a strategy tailored to each worker's needs.

To enrich the work experience and install motivation in your employees, implement these five practices into your organization:

Keep Balance between job enrichment and job enlargement. 

A growing business will inevitably require you to expand your employees' duties and responsibilities, known as job enlargement or horizontal job loading. While some thrive under a heavier workload of diverse tasks, others prefer more intensive and challenging tasks. It's important to understand where your employees fall on this spectrum so you can balance the duties and enrichment opportunities effectively; keeping everyone satisfied and motivated to go the extra mile.

Start career development discussions. 

Establish collaborative, cross-departmental discussions about the types of enrichment opportunities that employees feel would be most beneficial to them and their co-workers.

At Underground Elephant, we hold monthly lunches with an employee and an executive who don't normally interact with each other. Because of our flat hierarchy and emphasis on collaboration, employees are encouraged to ask questions about the company discuss career road bumps and successes and gain new insights into the business. This establishes a level of transparency and accessibility for employees to understand company decisions and gain new perspectives.

Offer continued education and training opportunities. 

Offering continued education, training, mentor-ship and/or tuition reimbursement can be highly beneficial to you and your employees. Employees appreciate the opportunity to broaden their skill sets and improve their standing in the company. And you gain a well-trained and adaptable workforce as a result.

Establish guidelines for educational and training opportunities that your company will cover. Collaborate with local colleges or professors to set up informational sessions to give your employees an idea of the opportunities available to them.

Implement cross-functional training. 

Begin a cross-functional training program that enables employees to learn skills and business strategies from other departments. This will give employees a clearer understanding of how their work fits into the company's broad business objectives. Because this approach leverages talent from within your current workforce, you will spend less on outside recruitment to fill vacancies, including temporary positions for employee vacations and leaves of absence.

Hand over some responsibility. 

When employees feel trusted and valued by their employers, they gain an enhanced sense of purpose, motivation and responsibility. Demonstrate trust in your employees by stepping away from the supervisor role, giving individuals more responsibility over projects or departments and training them to take on managerial duties.

As you plan your company's next step for financial and physical growth, don't neglect to consider your team's personal and professional growth as well. Strike a balance between increasing job responsibilities and job enrichment opportunities. This is the key to keeping your employees satisfied, motivated and focused on success -- both for themselves and their company.