Solving 3 Common Graduate Recruiting Challenges with 1 Solution

Campus hiring has always been a competitive venue for early talent recruiting. Now, with a historically low unemployment rate, graduates can be more discerning, and employers need to step up their game to effectively recruit and hire the highest quality talent available each graduate season. Simply put, if your process doesn’t hit the mark, candidates will move on and the quality of your pipeline will suffer.

The good news is that recent advances in campus hiring have allowed hiring organizations to streamline the process and better understand candidate quality, creating an abbreviated hiring process that engages candidates as they weigh their career options. Organizations who choose to embrace the innovations to meet candidate expectations will be rewarded with increasingly diverse candidate pipelines, and ultimately the best hires available.

Below are three challenges you can overcome by employing recent innovations in your campus hiring process.

Challenge #1: Understanding Candidate Potential with Limited On-the-Job Experience

You receive hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of graduate applicants. Allocating your time to candidates with the most potential can make the difference between a successful graduate hiring strategy and settling for the lower quality candidates who are still available at the end of the campus hiring season.

But understanding potential and career readiness relying on GPA or extracurriculars without work history or job-related experiences to draw from is increasingly difficult. To make up for this knowledge gap, campus recruiting teams spend long hours sifting through stacks of resumes, invite candidates to fill out painful pre-hire assessment questionnaires online, ask them to attend multiple face-to-face interviews, and hope applicants are hungry enough to actually complete the process.

Now, pre-hire assessments are not just online, they are focussed on user experience and technologically driven, so candidates can complete them on their device of choice, whenever they want. But, perhaps more importantly, technology has progressed so candidates do not need to fill out lengthy multiple choice questionnaires.

The Solution

It’s no longer necessary to put graduate candidates through extensive test batteries to get a grasp on their underlying competencies. Understanding candidate capability can be accomplished as they discuss their past experiences during an on-demand video interview, engage in interactive gameplay, and for technical hiring, work through coding challenges.

This means candidates who are busy with full class loads and finals can easily complete their assessment in under 30 minutes, while giving hiring teams much better information to quickly prioritize the candidates they want to advance in the process.

Challenge #2: Time to Hire is Not Competitive Enough to Hire the Best Candidates

A typical college graduate evaluates their career options and creates a short list of employers to apply to. Depending on the student, they could apply to 5-20 organizations during the graduate hiring season. The organizations that can move candidates through their process faster and extend offers before the competition tend to be rewarded with their top picks. Time is of the essence.

Every hiring process is unique, but all exist as a function of the number of steps and the time candidates spent in each step. The easiest way to shorten the hiring process is to eliminate steps in the process. HireVue’s graduate hiring solution combines multiple steps in the hiring process into a single, unified experience.

The Solution

In a single 30-minute candidate interaction, HireVue can provide an assessment report that prioritizes candidates based on the competencies needed for future success on the job. And because the candidate’s video responses were captured in the process, hiring teams have access to an OnDemand interview they can circulate to the team. This eliminates the need for countless phone screens or face-to-face interviews.

Now, you can arrive on campus prepared to make offers or conduct final face-to-face interviews after just one 30-minute interaction.

Challenge #3: Candidates want Quick and Relevant Feedback

The transition from an academic career to the world of work is difficult on many different levels. Regular feedback is not always commonplace once your career begins. But, throughout an academic career, students are asked to write papers, complete projects, and takes tests. In all cases, students receive quick feedback in the form of grades.

The Solution

There is a similar expectation in the application process. If an applicant takes the time to complete a pre-hire assessment, they expect feedback to help them understand how they performed. HireVue’s approach to bridge the gap is to offer the option of providing candidate feedback after they complete the assessment. Candidates receive competency-specific commentary to help them understand areas of strength as well as suggestions for improvement, based on their results.

This type of communication and feedback helps to fortify the relationship between the candidate and the company they are applying to. Ultimately, it creates a positive experience that can differentiate the hiring organization from the others who are competing for the same talent.

The competition for top early talent has intensified in the recent past, and especially in the campus hiring realm. Hiring organizations must continue to innovate their process to remain relevant in a rapidly this changing environment. Organizations who can identify top talent, advance them in the process quickly, and provide the right level of communication will continue to have access to the top prospects in each graduating class.

Register for the Webinar: Uncover Top Graduates with HireVue's New Graduate Assessments