Hiring a fresh graduate can be a tricky decision for hiring managers, and for good reason – for one, they have no prior experience working within an organization. This means there there is no criteria to evaluate their performance within a professional set-up. A combination of workplace inexperience and youthfulness may not quite suit well with what most employers have in mind while searching for new recruits.
On the other hand, everyone has to start somewhere. Even the most seasoned and valuable workers in any industry today were once untrained graduates during the early stages of their careers. Given proper training and guidance within an organization, freshly graduated job recruits can prove to be a viable long-term investment for the organization.
There are a few signs hiring managers should be on the look-out for while considering to hire recently graduated candidates for a job. These include:
Internship Experience and Side Projects
An internship program is the closest exposure that fresh graduates have had to a real-world working environment. Candidates possessing a fair amount of time within a notable program would indicate that they have made an effort to experience what it feels like to be an an office setting. While their tasks may have been minimal, such initiatives teach participants how to be operate within a professional setting.
Similarly, any involvement within independent or collaborative projects are always a major plus point – this may include well executed reports, freelance work or even university thesis publications.
Attitude and Outlook
Hiring managers are constantly looking for personality traits such independent thinking and self-motivation Freshly graduated job applicants possessing qualities reflecting good interpersonal skills, creativity and intellect stand a good chance of making it to the final cut of the recruitment process. In a way, the lack of experience may sometimes even be compensated for by the element of individuality and fresh ideas such candidates can bring to the table.
Problem Solving Abilities
A CGPA can only indicate a candidate’s level of performance within an educational institution based mostly on their individual efforts, What seasoned employers are aware of is that they can benefit from employees who have the ability to engage in critical thinking and execute the insights obtained within the framework of the organization. Furthermore, hiring managers focus extensively on the importance of being able to perform within a group or team.
The Red Flags
This is where hiring managers need to be cautious in their analysis of freshly graduated candidates – a lack of experience may be overturned through adequate training and specialization, however personality traits such as not being able to function within a team, being arrogant or lying can not be taught at the workplace. These attributes may hamper the proceedings of the organization itself and would be a cause the productivity of the selected candidate and those around them to diminish over time.
Employers become better at recognizing red flags with experience, and with time, they become efficient.