Since early February, I’ve been offering job seeking advice to the locals slated to graduate from college, no matter if they attended a tech/trade school or a four your university. Topics have ranged from the current job market to online personas.
Now that spring break has come and gone, we’re entering the homestretch to graduation, so we gotta buckle down and finish the rest of the lessons before you all walk across the stage.
Trends: I kind of alluded to this in an earlier article, but you need to know the ebb and flow of your industry of interest and its hiring practices. No crystal ball needed here; if you know when or how often hiring practices spike for a particular industry or market, then it should be obvious when to apply and when the bulk of the interviews will be conducted.
You have to be tactical in your pursuit of the interview. Not all industries’ hiring trends are calendar based so honestly, this tactic could prove to be challenging. Besides just checking the company’s website periodically, if you can ascertain when a company’s fiscal year begins, then deducing when interviews are likely to be scheduled in bulk for open positions should be a bit easier. Hiring budgets always tend to be more robust at the beginning of the company’s first quarter (Q1).
Interview Economics: Certain well-paying jobs are not plentiful, so you have to do some homework to know who is hiring, where the company is hiring and if it’s viable that you could be someone a company is willing to dedicate resources to for an interview.
In some cases, it’s all about money, and it could be on your dime if an onsite interview is granted. A phone screening, no problem, all companies conduct those because the expenditure is minimal. Flying several candidates into one location, accruing lodging and meal cost isn’t a thing of the past, but companies are highly scrutinizing how their talent acquisition budgets are being spent.
Sometimes, teams of managers are dispensed from corporate on a recruiting tour of collegiate career fairs to locate recent grads. Some more cutting-edge companies who want to reduce recruiting expenditures have incorporated utilizing online video tools such as Skype and ooVoo or online video services from SparkHire, WePow, EasyShare, LaunchPad Recruits, VidCruiter and Breezy HR to get through the first and second rounds of interviews.
In short, regionalizing your career search could, and let me emphasize could make you more likely to secure an interview if you have the right credentials and are near a company’s desired location.
It may seem a bit farfetched, but I and several of my colleagues have conducted searches for recent college grads, and location of the talent pool was a factor. The thought process is, “if I can find the grads needed to fill my open positions close to the location of need, why venture any further than I have to.”
This practice doesn’t always yield the desired results for the recruiter. However, I believe that if companies are conducting recruiting practices and regionalizing candidates is one of the components of those practices, then you the applicant should be aware of it.
In fact, I believe that the goal of a recruiter or talent acquisition manager is “to find the most qualified and/or experienced applicant(s); in the least amount of time and expenditure; in order to select and hire the best candidates; who will provide maximum performance for their company as employees.”
Just a nugget of information for you to ponder. However, by all means, apply for the positions that you want no matter where they are.