UK 
United States
Graduate recruitment season is upon us! Employers all over the country will be locking horns in the coming months at graduate recruitment events, striving to entice new talent to their organisations.
And while recruitment events do play a massive part in tempting top graduates to your organisation’s balmy shores, the vast majority of the battle will take place online.
This years’ graduates spend more passive time online than any generation before them- a trend that is likely to continue. In essence- if you lose the online talent battle for graduates, you lose the war. So how can you compete in the online space? Engagement, Experience, Enchantment. That’s how.
1. Engagement
Engaging grads is perhaps the toughest E. The way most graduates prefer to communicate compared to the channels open to most In-House Recruitment Managers is at its widest ever point- another trend that is likely to continue. Graduates don’t want a postal address and a contact number in your contact information. And unless you can reply to Tweets within minutes, they don’t want that either. Graduates want to communicate using mediums and platforms that suit them.
Retailer Dunelm recently revamped their graduate recruitment gateway, which encourages graduates to use WhatsApp as the main contact channel. This provides graduates with a way to engage with the Dunelm recruitment team using a medium they are at ease with.
Importantly, Dunelm haven’t provided multiple contact channels- just one. This means it is manageable for the recruitment team. Realistic, but engaging.
2. Experience
For graduates, candidate experience is all about mobile first design. Candidate applications that are completed entirely on mobile devices are growing, but haven’t grown as quickly as many would expect. The reason: it is usually very difficult (sometimes impossible!) to complete an end to end application on mobile. When targeting a generation that almost exclusively use mobile devices, this is a massive barrier to application. Fortunately, there are really simple things you can do to improve it.
- Upload CVs from Cloud Storage Devices- for example OneDrive, Goggle Drive and Dropbox
- Mobile responsive careers portal
- Apply with social profiles
3. Enchantment
“Why should I work for you?” Say the class of 2017, eager to find out what benefits your company can offer them. Simple benefits- such as half day Fridays- may be appealing to those graduates interested in maintaining a strong work/life balance, and can be included as major selling points.
Another less traditional ways to delight graduates could be gamification. Gamification doesn’t have to be a gimmick to drive traffic, it can be made relevant to the job and incorporated into the application process itself.
So is your online graduate attraction strategy ready for the class of 2017? If you’d like a second opinion, you can request a free candidate experience health check.
