What Are College Graduates Looking For Today



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

There are two mindsets you as a potential employer can adopt to deal with these future kings and queens. Take the “when I was their age” approach, dismiss their expectations as delusions of entitlement, and go about recruiting them as if they should feel lucky to work for you and have a chance to pay their dues for a while. Or, embrace this new paradigm and appeal to their aspirations. “Hey, if you want to be the next Lou Gerstner or Meg Whitman, that’s great. Come to McKinsey and we can help make that happen,” said one McKinsey recruiter.

When Daniel, a graduate student at UC San Diego, interned for a major car maker, he spent the first three weeks just reading “background” materials before his manager took the time to explain what exactly his project would entail. The delay sent the message to Daniel that his project wasn’t very important. The next fall biotechnology firms Medtronic and Guidant were able to steal Daniel’s interest from the automobile industry by clearly describing the work he would do if he joined them and providing examples of why the projects mattered to the companies’ goals.

The biggest mistake employers make

Recruiting Maria should have been a piece of cake for any technology company. She first discovered her passion for computers during middle school, and she often practiced her programming skills in spare time throughout high school. Then in two summers during college she held computer science internships in which she thrived. Maria was one of the top computer science students in MIT’s class of 2006 and was surely going to join a technology company after college, right? Wrong.

While she loved the field, Maria did not want to feel like she was committing her life to computer technology. Like most other top college graduates, she’s so bright she can do anything and so young she isn’t sure what to do first. Maria broached this issue with recruiters from several technology companies who were dying to have her. But when she sent the message that she wasn’t sure she wanted to do programming for the rest of her life, the recruiters just changed the subject.

“All I wanted them to do was reassure me,” Maria said. “Just tell me, ‘You aren’t committing your life to this. Of course, we think you’ll love the job and the company, but if you don’t, there are so many different paths you can take later. We have people who’ve done it all.’” That’s just the message she got from Bain & Co., a consulting company and one of McKinsey’s main competitors. Of her signing with Bain, Maria said, “At least with Bain, I felt confident that I would be able to pursue any profession after working there.”

The biggest and most common mistake employers make is leaving their target recruits feeling as if accepting an internship or a full-time job is like signing their life away to the organizations. One recruiter at a large consumer products company pitched his company’s retirement benefits to the candidate, noting that if he worked there, the candidate would have a “million dollars—cash” when he retired. Retired. That’s the R-word to college students.

Employers often get angry and defensive when they see this last point and wish the students were thinking more about what’s best for the company. Time to face the facts. Students do not think about what’s best for your organization during the recruiting process. They may start to think about the company once they actually begin to work. But while they’re deciding where they will work, they only think about one thing: keeping their options open.

So it’s your job to proactively allay their fears of getting stuck and reassure them that working for you is, in fact, one of the many steps they can take after college toward a sky’s-the-limit future. To do this, you must continuously answer the following two questions, things your recruits are thinking even if they don’t ask!

1. If I join your organization after college, will I have to do the same thing for the rest of my life?

Here’s your line: “It’s your life.” Let recruits know that taking this job does not mean they have to stay in this profession, this company, or even this industry later in their career. If they want to, of course, you’ll help, but it’s up to them. You may think this is silly, but this small admission shows recruits that you care about your employees’ personal careers. And this will get you better recruits.

2. What can I do after my first job with your organization?

Give them role models. Openly discuss the careers of predecessors—even ones who eventually left your organization. If design engineers in your firm have moved on to jobs in marketing or sales within your company or others, talk it up. Describe options in such diversity and number that your concluding statement becomes, “See, you can basically do anything after this job.”

Teach For America, a nonprofit that sends recent college grads into inner city school districts as well as one of the most innovative college-recruiting organizations, makes a point of highlighting its graduates’ success. After a two-year teaching stint, alumni go to graduate school, academia, technology, and just about every other industry you can imagine. Teach For America’s legendary network has helped make the employer irresistible. Last year, Teach For America had over 18,000 applicants (mostly from elite schools) and rejected more than half of them. Teach for America has made a nonprofit sexy, and working for them only gets more attractive to young recruits as its network grows.

Chapter takeaway: The first step in successful recruiting is to truly understand your potential hires—their values, their career goals, and their psychology. They have been training for their careers for a long time, and are intensely aware of the importance of their first choice out of the gate. Give them a sense that your company offers open-endedness, flexibility, growth, prestige, and respect when it comes to their career.

Other free recruiting guides in this series

▪ The #1 Reason Interns Don’t Return To Companies (And How To Fix It)

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

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

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

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An excerpt from the new book

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

What are College Graduates Looking for Today? Understanding Your Recruits

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.

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