Conducting a Graduate Recruitment Program

What Makes a Good Graduate Recruitment Process?

The stages of eliciting application forms range from simple and cheap to extremely complex and costly. There is no inherently 'best' way of achieving the recruitment goal, only what is most appropriate for your organisation. This depends on a number of issues:

• How many graduates do you want to recruit?
• Which discipline is required, or is any academic background acceptable?
• Do you have an image or brand that you use?
• Are the jobs local or (inter)national?
• Are you a centralised or de-centralised organisation?
• Is this campaign a ‘one-off’, or part of a long-term strategy?
• Which other organisations are competitors for the same graduates?
• Will the recruits be the senior managers of the future, or are they filling gaps created by employees leaving the organisation?
• Is there an individual who can spend some time managing the relevant processes?
• How big is the budget?
• How committed is senior management?

The responses to these questions (and others that you may have) need to be analysed to determine your organisation’s approach – your recruitment strategy. A good way to capture this information succinctly is to perform the well-known SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses (the internal factors), Opportunities and Threats (issues from outside the organisation).

Strategy Essentials

You will use recruitment strategies that match the needs of your organisation, therefore the way your vacancies are made known to potential applicants should reflect the way you want to recruit. You should develop a recruitment plan at the beginning of the campaign, not part way through. If you have to make adjustments as you go along (other than planned contingencies) then there were probably parts of your strategy that were not properly thought through. When planning, it is useful to keep in mind current legislation governing privacy and freedom of information, an important part of risk prevention. It is also essential to keep the length of each part of the process to a minimum, as some candidates can spend up to 20 hours on applications alone if they are applying for multiple positions.

Development of Pro-forma Letters

It can be a worthwhile and cost-effective strategy to develop pro-forma letters for various parts of the graduate recruitment process early on; these can include acknowledgment letters for receipt of résumés and applications, letters declining the applications of candidates, letters of invitation to interview and offers, as well as invitations to post-offer functions. Determining the content of these letters as far as possible in advance will offer considerable time and cost savings further down the track and will also help crystalise exactly what the process as a whole is attempting to achieve.