Should You Hire College Grads?
Yes, that’s a question that often come across tech hiring panel of different companies.
Often you would have seen the minimum requirements of a company is to hire someone with 2-3 years of experience or more. It has started picking up momentum these days, unfortunately. Let’s hire SE2 and not SE I. A lot of tech companies believe, hiring freshers is challenging to groom them, and yes I’m not talking about sudo freshers who has multiple projects done before getting into companies. How would you get senior candidates if there would be a few companies hiring college grads?
To that I say, “No tree has ever grown, without being a sapling first”.
It is natural for a company to hire the best talent available in the market, but while doing that are you sure you set the right expectation for the role? Are you conscious of the kind of biased trends you set for the company and for the industry? Are you making yourself accountable of your actions? Some companies are, most companies follow up with their version of policies.
It is the responsibility of the company and the hiring manager to make sure to clearly explain the roles and responsibilities in their job description. If possible, guide candidates through company their career sites. There are some companies who do this really well, others need to catchup. One idea, is to organize an open physical forum for candidates to join and understand what it means working for your company. Not every candidate is coming from IIT’s or NIT’s or any other top colleges from India, where there is a habitat of industry grown professionals as their professors or seniors. Statistically, the constitute a very short percentage of engineers in India. Now, people would say, well there’s internet, what excuse a candidate has to make? Ask yourself this, whether your company practices and vital information required to be your employee is available in the internet? Let me remind you, we are talking of freshers, a lot of times they don’t know how to find all this. Whether freshers know this or not, roles of same designation has different responsibilities in different companies.
Hire college grads and groom them well, they would lead the industry after you. Our consideration would help shape someone’s life, let’s be conscious of it.
