Hiring College Graduates Can Benefit Your Company

By Koleen Singerline

Colleges and universities are institutions with a long history of preparing their students efficiently so that they could enter the workforce with experience and training in a specific field of study. Students choose to continue their education at the college level with the hopes of using their degree to develop a career filled with good pay and benefits. However, in the past few years, businesses have retecent to bring these applicants into the workforce.

According to a November 2011 report by the Project on Student Debt , the class of 2010 faced the highest unemployment levels for new college graduates in recent history with a 9.1% unemployment rate . This statistic is still less than half the unemployment rate for young adults with only a high school diploma. In addition to a high unemployment rate, 2010 college graduates owed an average of 25,250 in loans , which is up 5% from the previous year. About two-thirds of the class of 2010 graduated with student debt.

A recent job forecast from CareerBuilder found that employers are gradually hiring more recent college graduates this year. 46% of employers said they plan to hire recent college graduates in 2011, which is up from 44% in 2010 and 43% in 2009. Overlooking the lack of work experience, these companies hire recent college graduates based on other relevant experiences: internships, part-time jobs in another field, volunteer work, class work, involvement in school organizations, managing activities for sororities and fraternities and participation in sports.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, in 2007, college graduates who applied for work had a medium of 2.5 job offers. Now, due to the recession, more than 50% of graduates who apply for jobs do not have any offers . In a national survey of 28,000 seniors from the Class of 2011, 42% who applied for work got a job offer, which is an increase from 32% in 2010. Only 24% of those who applied for jobs had a job by graduation, which is the same percentage from 2010. Due to the rising number of graduates, it could take years for the job market to recover enough for them to have the same level of offers as the Class of 2007.

Companies looking to add current thinking and new technologies to their workplace will benefit by including recent graduates in their candidate pool. These young professionals can bring a new perspective to business issues and may be instrumental in helping your company look at problems from a new angle.  Most are anxious to learn and are not held back by a focus on the way things were done in the past. New technologies such as social media are a way of life for new graduates and they can be very helpful in helping you determine how to apply emerging tools such as social media to your business.