The Number One Reason Interns Don’t Return To Companies ...



Get more book excerpts and bonus recruiting materials at

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

RECRUIT OR DIE

“Recruit or Die should be a college recruiter’s bible! Everyone on the IBM team will get a copy!”

—ELETTA KERSHAW, IBM University Recruiting

“If you want to compete in today’s fast-paced, highstakes war for young talent, Recruit or Die is the

field manual to get you there.”

—SHEILA CURRAN, Exec. Director, Duke University Career Center

“If you want a great organization, you need to hire amazing people. These days, if you want amazing

people, you need to earn them. This book shows you how. I can’t imagine hiring on campus without a copy.”

—SETH GODIN, author, The Dip

Microsoft, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs will get 100 résumés for every one that your company does. So what are you going to do about it?

The world of entry-level college recruiting has changed. It now takes more than simply attending a campus career fair, hosting an information session, and posting job descriptions to attract the best young talent to work for your organization. Recruit or Die provides a powerful, inside look at one of the hottest fronts of the war for talent. You don’t have to be the biggest or most well-known company to scoop up the best and the brightest on campus. Small, young, or even nonprofit companies can also get top graduates—without a Wall Street budget—if they learn the secrets of America’s top recruiters.

Based on surveys and interviews of more than one thousand students, Recruit or Die provides dozens of anecdotes and case studies to show how successful recruiters work their magic and how unsuccessful recruiters blow it.

You’ll learn key strategies that will help you:

▪ Lure the most talented recruits when they’re only freshmen or sophomores with creative internship programs…build your brand early so you’re not overlooked later

▪ Pitch your entry-level positions as the first step toward a glittering résumé or a leg up before grad school…avoid sounding like a dead-end company

▪ Stay in touch with new recruits during the crucial “long honeymoon” when communication is more important than ever…create a community of first-year employees

Straight from the front lines of elite recruiting, Recruit or Die shows how any company can conquer the campus.

Recruit or Die – in bookstores everywhere August 2, 2007.

Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent

The number one reason interns don’t return for a second summer or full-time work is their desire to get experience working in as many companies and industries as possible. They have a severe fear of commitment, but only because they think that if they stay with the same company, they’ll be doing the same job for the rest of their lives. Prove them wrong. Here’s how to make your star interns offers they can’t refuse.

1. Give interns a leg up on their peers next time around by allowing them to start work at an earlier date. They gain great confidence by being up-to-speed before their peers.

2. Offer a financial bonus for their return. (Yes, we’re talking money again, but it costs less to retain an employee than to attract and recruit a new one.)

3. Let interns have their pick of groups in which to work the second time around.

4. Set up a special mentoring program for returning intern recruits. They’ll appreciate your investing more in them in return for their investing more time in you.

Finally, if you’re successful in your efforts to get interns to return, document the success stories as you go. If you want to consistently sell future interns on second terms or full-time employment with your organization, you need the evidence of it having been done before.

When Christine, an aeronautical engineering major, asked for advice on whether to apply to work for Boeing Satellite Systems, we told her to consider that the company had great tuition reimbursement for graduate schools nearby in the Los Angeles area. Christine was dubious. Although she’d heard about reimbursement programs, she didn’t know anyone who’d taken advantage of them. She thought there must be so many hoops to jump through to get the reimbursement that nobody actually ever did it—that it was just a marketing ploy. Au contraire. Juan, another student who had recently earned his master’s degree from the very strong aerospace engineering department at UCLA, said Boeing not only paid for his degree, they gave him the scheduling flexibility to work, go to school, and to feel like he still had a life. When Christine heard this, her eyes lit up. “Where can I apply?”

You won’t consistently win recruits with the simple promise that a stint with your organization will keep their careers on the fast track. You have to tell them stories about people who started out just like them and, with your help, went on to reach milestones like making a six-figure salary after X years, earning a graduate degree, or whatever else your recruits are shooting for. If they don’t see evidence, they’ll assume it hasn’t happened. And very few students these days have the faith and audacity to be sold down the road not taken. Most prefer that you hand them a map to the road that’s been taken again and again.

In the same way Harvard sells incoming students on walking the same halls as Presidents, Nobel Laureates, and Fortune 500 CEOs, McKinsey touts the out-of-this-world acceptance rate of its analyst classes to elite business schools. Few organizations have track records comparable to McKinsey’s, and that’s okay. Christine was sold on Boeing once she heard that Juan had actually made Boeing’s tuition reimbursement program work for him. Maybe your most desired recruit is itching to start his own company and would consider working for yours first if he knew about all of your former employees who went on to become entrepreneurs.

Stories of how working for you has helped people’s careers should be the centerpiece of your recruiting message: Tony’s accelerated position lets him learn the many parts of our business. We paid for Juan’s master’s degree and made his schedule flexible so he could keep working to earn his regular salary. We helped Susan develop skills she needed to run her own company. In fact, you should give her a call to chat about it. Include these stories on your recruiting web pages, in new-hire rotation programs, all over your on-campus advertising, and in the pitches of each and every person who represents your organization to students.

Chapter takeaway: After believing that you care about their careers, the next most important thing to your target recruits is feeling that working for you includes a “cool” factor. Decide what’s best given your organization’s line of business, location, and budget, and make sure they know what you’re doing for them. Only one question determines whether your “glamour” tactics work: Does it make your recruits feel special and wanted?

Other free recruiting guides in this series

▪ Five Ways to Keep Your New Employees – Or Interns! – From Jumping Ship

▪ What Are College Graduates Looking For Today? Understanding Your Recruits

▪ Writing Job Descriptions That Sell Top College Graduates: A Before-and-After Case Study

Recruit or Die – in bookstores everywhere August 2, 2007.

-----------------------

Read FREE excerpts and pre-order your copy at

Read FREE excerpts and pre-order your copy at

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

▪ CHRIS RESTO, founding director of MIT’s largest professional development and internship program, the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP), has advised hundreds of companies and thousands of college students on recruiting.

▪ IAN YBARRA, a recent MIT graduate, assisted Resto with MIT UPOP as an undergraduate and has since written for publications such as Inc., , and .

▪ RAMIT SETHI, a recent Stanford graduate, is co-founder and vice president of marketing for the online start-up PBWiki.

An excerpt from the new book

Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent

The #1 Reason Interns Don’t Return To Companies

(And How To Fix It)

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download