Hiring freshers or fresh college graduates through campus recruitment for an organization is a great move to infuse the workplace environment with positivity, enthusiasm, energy, and passion. Youngsters are full of zeal and optimism and are hungry for growth - both mentally and financially.
However, every coin has two sides, and hiring freshers in an organization also comes with a few challenges. Firstly, hiring them is a big challenge, because all freshers are the same - fresh college graduates with little or no experience at all. Thus, their expertise and skills still need to be discovered.
Secondly, due to zero work experience with an organization, freshers usually haven’t explored themselves as an individual. They are rarely aware of their interests and passion and thus, are usually difficult to retain for a long time.
Nevertheless, in this article, we will discuss everything that you need to know about hiring and retaining freshers in your organization.
What is Fresher Hiring?
Freshers are people with no or little work experience. They are usually fresh college graduates. People who enter into a new field after working for another field or industry for some time are not considered freshers.
Fresher hiring is recruiting people with little or no experience. It is usually done through a process called a campus recruitment drive, wherein top recruiters from an organization visit a campus, attract freshers to apply for their jobs, connect with them, evaluate them on certain skills, interview them, and finally give them job offers. When these students finish their graduation, they join these companies on the same offers.
How to Attract Freshers?
When you go for a campus recruitment drive, you meet freshers who are students looking forward to getting a job before they finish their graduation. Thus, it is not very difficult to attract these students to apply for your jobs.
Below are simple tips to attract freshers for your jobs.
Easy Application Process
The generation today believes in instant things. Anything that takes up a lot of time makes them lose interest. Thus, you must ensure that the application process in your organization - direct or in campus drive - should be seamless and short.
You can either just ask them to submit their resumes or fill up a short application form that just focuses on the basics. Going into details further than that might make the application way too long and you might even risk losing some of the potential hires.
Easy Recruitment Process
Some companies linger on their recruitment process for days and even weeks. This makes the process too long and overwhelming for these Gen Z people. Try to keep your recruitment process as short as possible. In fact, you should aim to finish the whole recruitment in a college within a day or two.
Engage Gen Z through Social Media
Gen Z is the generation that is mostly immersed in social media. Hence, a great way to connect with them is through LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or X (Twitter). Post regularly on your pages to target these people.
You can also request the digital teams of the colleges and universities where you plan to conduct recruitment drives to post about your company on their pages to increase the engagement of students of a specific college or university.
Get the Best Recruitment Team
A team consisting of the best recruiters in your company can create a lot of impact on the young minds of the students who are soon-to-be graduates. These recruiters can plan to present the organizational culture, reward system, remuneration system, and other benefits that your organization offers to these students so that they know what they can expect from their prospective employer.
Organize Tests and Activities
Through frequent quizzes, online tests with real-world problem statements, and activities like hackathons, students get attracted to the organization. The excitement and zeal of such exercises release a dopamine effect in the students' minds, making them more likely to apply for a job with your company.
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How to Hire Freshers?
Conducting fresher hiring in a college or university requires a lot of planning and preparation. Below is the step-by-step process for the same.
Connect with the Universities
Search for the college or university where you wish to conduct your campus drive. You can use websites such as Glassdoor.com or Quora.com to read reviews of freshers from different places.
When you know which college to approach, send them an official mail of your wish to conduct a campus recruitment drive and work upon your schedule and duration to visit the college along with their team.
Connect with Students through Social Media
Once your schedule is fixed, you can connect with the students of that college through social media. You can also request the digital team of the college to help you connect with their students.
When the students are already aware of who is coming for the recruitment drive and what they can expect from this company during the recruitment process and after getting employed, they tend to get more attracted to the organization.
Design the Recruitment Process and Desired Skills
Plan on designing your recruitment process with precision. Discuss every detail within the team before actually conducting the drive. What are the desired skills that you are looking for in your hires?
Furthermore, what are the essential skills that a candidate must have and what are the preferred skills that a candidate is preferred to have to get selected for the role in your organization?
Next, how many rounds do you plan to have in your campus recruitment drive? And, what would these be? Will you be conducting the interviews directly? Will there be a group discussion round to test your candidates’ communication skills?
Nevertheless, it is always recommended to shortlist candidates before you head to take their interviews so as to make the whole process a bit shorter and easier. For this, you can introduce a skill assessment test that they need to clear before getting selected for the interviews.
If there are a lot of applicants and you have a very few vacancies, you can also introduce a group discussion round to eliminate some students and shortlist fewer ones for the interview round.
Prepare Skill Assessment Tests
A skill assessment test is usually recommended during a campus recruitment drive for a quick and seamless experience for students as well as recruiters. Such a test can be designed to check both the hard and soft skills of candidates.
WeCP offer skill assessments for conducting a seamless campus recruitment drive to test the competencies of candidates in any kind of coding language or IT skills. The tool is designed to provide questions, evaluation results, and ranks to all the participants based on their performance in the test.
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Conduct the Final Rounds
Once you have shortlisted the candidates for the next round, you can proceed with them for group discussion or final interviews. You can either choose to disclose the final selections then and there or send an email to the college authorities after analyzing the results of the interviews within a few days.
How to Retain Freshers?
Organizations across the world are facing the “great resignation” post-pandemic. That’s because employees are no longer working for just money. They are now looking for a purpose in their jobs as well as in their lives that can only be achieved through job satisfaction.
And, freshers are no different. They are looking for purposeful personal and professional lives. Thus, to retain freshers, your company needs to offer much more than just good remuneration, such as rewards, job satisfaction, intellectual growth, work-life balance, etc.
Flexible Working Options
Offering flexible time and working options is a great way to let your employees enjoy a good work-life balance. Assign them a job, be clear about the hows and whens, and give them the option to work anytime and from anywhere and see the difference for yourself.
Make Communication Easy
Freshers are usually hesitant to communicate with their seniors. Over time, this communication barrier becomes so big that it becomes a major obstacle to their learning and professional growth, leading them to resign from the organization.
However, if an organization creates simple channels of communication between new employees and their leads or managers, there is no room for any confusion when it comes to executing a certain task.
This makes freshers more confident in what they do and what they learn. They also feel supported in the organization by the senior employees, making them feel safe and comfortable in the organization.
Provide Growth Opportunities
When an organization offers opportunities for incentives, rewards, upskilling, and appraisals, fresher employees feel more enthusiastic and energetic to work for the company.
Additionally, if you can also offer things like gym memberships, discount coupons for food, or relaxation time and ways during working hours, it becomes the cherry on the cake for freshers who have recently entered the corporate world and need a courtship period to adjust to their changing lives.
Conclusion
Hiring freshers has both advantages and disadvantages for an organization. They are more zealous and energetic while working. However, since they have no work experience, it is difficult to comprehend if they possess the key skills to perform well in the job at hand.
Nonetheless, with the skill assessment tool by WeCP, you can easily test the fresher candidates on any of their technical and soft skills and evaluates all the participants and ranks them according to their performance so you can easily shortlist or disqualify each one of them in no time with minimal human effort.
Want to know more on how WeCP can help you out? Try WeCP for free or Schedule a Call with us.
