Recent grads can be a tremendous asset to your business, not just because they are young but because they possess certain skills and capabilities that more seasoned employees may not have. The ones that come with up-to-date academic knowledge, a passion for ingenuity, and creative problem solving capabilities are the ones your organization needs—but your recruiters and hiring managers need to be adept at finding them. How can your company ensure that you are fully leveraging the potential power of new grads?
Show off your updated HR processes. Research has shown that individual hiring manager bias can hinder certain groups of people from being hired. Similarly, we rely on the job interview so much that hiring decisions tend to reward good interviewers rather than good candidates. All of these tendencies impede newly graduated employees from being selected—and our recruiting and selection processes do nothing to moderate them. Adopting processes that enable your organization to hire for potential rather than experience can help drive significant change, both in terms of how we view the “ideal candidate” and in who we ultimately choose to work in our organizations. This work does not stop at recruiting. Adopting performance management processes that focus on impact and the future rather than on past accomplishments further reinforces an organizational culture in which the road ahead is what matters most—and that your organization is a place where early career talent can succeed.
Remove the influence of unconscious bias. In our search for the “perfect” candidate we often don’t realize we are paving the way for only specific groups of candidates to succeed. Recruiting technology can help surface potential bias in the recruiting process, helping us determine where to focus when creating more equitable, fair selection practices. From enabling us to determine the words and phrases that create demographically unbalanced job applicant groups to allowing us access to rich data and reports that show hiring and retention trends, technology can act as an ally in efforts to ensure we are not excluding and overlooking early career talent.
Consider the culture. It often seems like ageism is the last acceptable form of workplace discrimination. It is not uncommon for managers and coworkers to remark on how young someone looks, particularly when they’ve achieved something difficult or important. Consider abolishing this phraseology from your workforce in favor of a culture that encourages and congratulates everyone for their successes.
Consider the needs of your organization. When it comes down to it, your company needs to attract, engage, and harness the people who will best support the strategy, mission, and vision your leaders have crafted. Hiring young employees for the sake of having young employees is not what will lead you to this goal. But neither is inadvertently overlooking or dismissing entire groups of employees based on unconscious bias. Although not classically experienced, newly graduated employees have a lot to offer your organization. Can you spot their potential before your competitors do?
An earlier version of this article was published on ERE.
