It's a Monday morning in May and you're scrolling through LinkedIn. You see a post from a close friend who's announcing their daughter's graduation. Then you see another one. And another one. So many new graduates in 2021. And then you think, I haven't heard of any entry-level grads starting at the organization. With such a large graduating class, why aren't you recruiting early career talent?
The problem is that many organizations reserve entry-level jobs for specific roles. When that particular spot isn't needed, then early talent gets left in the dust. But it's time to think about early talent in a new way. I'm living proof that entry-level talent can onboard quickly, ramp up to numerous tasks, and take on more responsibilities.
3 reasons why you need early talent mobility
In 2020, I started as an intern in Marketing at Symphony Talent. During my internship, I shadowed colleagues, was mentored by the VP, and worked on numerous marketing tasks ranging from each department area.
Fast forward a year later, I've graduated and signed a full-time contract to work as a Senior Marketing Associate here at Symphony Talent. I had no second thoughts about signing the contract because I know I have plenty of room to grow. In this case, Symphony Talent practiced what they preach, and they recruited early career talent via an employee referral and internship. (Discover more ways to hire for potential, not for experience here).
The top three reasons why early career talent will benefit your organization include:
- Hiring early career talent, like me, is hiring the future of your organization. When you invest in early career talent today, you set your organization up for its future leadership workforce. Entry-level today means management tomorrow.
- Early career talent is the largest talent pool in today's competitive labor market. Hiring early career talent puts you in front of thousands of more eager-to-work candidates than ever before.
- Recent grads are eager to learn. Today's tech-savvy talent brings new skills, ideas, and techniques to your organization. Not only will they learn from you, but you can take the time to learn from the current methods and practices they learned while at a higher education facility or trade school.
How to promote talent mobility for early career talent
To attract early talent or keep entry-level talent at your organization, you'll need to build pipelines and engage employees with internal mobility. Talent mobility is an area where most software providers have a significant gap.
Recruiting isn't easy. Keep the top talent you already attracted to your brand engaged and performing at your organization by offering talent mobility opportunities here's how.
- Internal Career Site: Internal Career Marketing Sites are similar to the External Career Marketing sites in that the sites are branded and styled to match the look and feel of your corporate website or intranet, and contain various landing pages, internal job search, internal job search results, job details, job apply flow, as well as events and referrals pages. You control the messaging, content and job information that you share on your internal career site vs. your external career site for a personalized employees-only experience. The internal career site lives behind your firewall with SSO authentication for employees, and the applicants route through your internal application process.
- Internal Talent Pipelines: Allow current employees to join talent pools to stay informed and engaged on future job openings. Don't lose a rockstar employee simply because they don't see career growth opportunities. Encourage employees to sign up to talent pools to learn more about job openings as they go live (and before they post externally).
- Internal Job Alerts: Send internal job alerts to employees who have joined talent pools and the organization at large. Not everyone is checking in on recruitment marketing newsletters in their inboxes (along with 3,000 other emails). Make it easier for them to be alerted of new jobs with job alert email blasts. At Symphony Talent, hiring managers share open roles so that current employees can raise their hand if they want to learn more about the role or team. As a bonus, sharing open roles also internally promotes employee referrals.
Although these are important to hiring early career talent and retaining entry-level employees, these are important to all levels. An individual might be the perfect fit for the organization, but not the position they're in. Allow them to have the mobility to find their ideal job.
Next time you're scrolling through LinkedIn, think about all of the recent grads that are yearning for that opportunity to show their stuff and grow with your organization.
