Category Archives: Employers
Career Fairs 101: After the Career Fair
Entry by Pat Patterson
Students
After a career fair (From the 2010 September INTERNnetwork):
Jot down your notes and organize the information you collected (including contact information – it is a good idea to note where you met certain individuals and what you talked about), write thank you notes to those you met, apply for positions you are interested in, and follow up with employers about applications you submitted.
Remember, making a positive impression with people greatly influences your internship and career search. When recruiters sift through resumes and decide who they plan to interview, you are more likely to stand out if the recruiters remember who you are and the interest you showed in their particular organization.
Employers
After the Career Fair (From the National Association of Colleges and Employers NACE)
Post-fair activities do help with your recruiting efforts. Here are some ideas:
Host a networking …
Career Fairs 101: Selling Your Company to Potential Interns
Entry by Pat Patterson
From the 2010 September INTERNnetwork:
Now that you have established a need for interns in your organization, you need to make sure you have students that are interested in your internship opportunities. And although having too many interested candidates may not be a bad thing, it is important that the candidates you attract are qualified for your positions and are the right fit for your organization.
Conveying a clear, concise message about your organization and its mission is vital in attracting the type of talent you would like to fill your internships. Here are some tips on how to sell your company to interns, specifically at career fairs:
Have a section of your website dedicated to your internship opportunities, including detailed descriptions, which you can direct interns to visit (the link can be included on any literature students are provided before the career fair), attend those …
Career Services Professionals: Best Practices
Entry by Pat Patterson
Now that students are back to school and somewhat settled in, it is likely that more students will start visiting their campus career services office. As career services professionals, it is important to keep on top of the best practices in the current market to help students acquire internships and jobs.
The following is a list of advice from the Intern Bridge’s blog The Intern Advocate, which will help you help your students:
Get a RSS reader account. Find blogs that dole out daily or weekly advice pertaining to job searching and career centers. Add each blog to an RSS reader, such as Google Reader, and make a point to check it at least three times per week. If your career center has social media accounts, be sure to share helpful articles with your students directly!
Read new literature available. There are countless …
Employers: Are You Effectively Branding Your Organization?
Entry by Pat Patterson
Your organization’s brand determines its reputation, which will in turn determine how well your organization will perform. Therefore, it is important to periodically ask yourself if you are effectively doing all you can to take charge of your brand. Even if you are not hiring interns or employees for the fall, consider attending campus career fairs to spread awareness of your organization and its future work opportunities.
Consider these results from NACE’s 2010 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey, citing career fairs as the most effective branding tool:
More than 90 percent of employers taking part in NACE’s 2010 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey cited branding to the campus as very important to their program. In addition, more than 90 percent cited career/job fairs, the corporate web site, and building relationships with key faculty as the tools and activities they use to build their brand. Nearly two-thirds of those using career/job …
Employers: Recruiting Millennials
Entry by Pat Patterson
Before you pack up your materials to begin recruiting interns on college campuses, take some time to strategize how you will market your organization. More importantly, think about the characteristics of your target audience – Millennials, those born between 1977 and 1998. The more you know about Millennials, the more you can tailor your recruiting efforts to entice their interests. Here are some Key Characteristics of Today’s Adolescents:
Self-reliance – They believe that becoming successful is up to them, and they are not depending on others for help. Finding a good job is a priority. They are the young navigators. They must chart their own course and captain their own ship: “It’s up to me to create my own well-being.” They value personal experience and are prone to seek out critical thinkers. They are independent and emotionally and intellectually open. They strongly value individual rights: …
Indiana INTERNnet: The Next Generation
Change is in the air for Indiana INTERNnet. We are designing a new website that will position the organization to utilize new media in serving our user database populations. The plan is to unveil the new site in 2011, and here’s what we have in store:
Email integration to deliver timely, automated communication to INTERNnet users, website integration of social media tools, higher level of search functions, including filtering mechanisms designed to zero in on search results, enhanced matching technologies to provide a robust solution intended to help people discover the best internship match, and improved visability of our blog, Indiana INTERNnation, intended to offer ease-of-use for contributing authors.
Overall, we know we are competing with every other communication channel for the attention of our users and we’re working to make Indiana INTERNnet: The Next Generation a destination site that will offer a dynamic, interactive, and more engaging experience for …
Employers: Market Your Internships via Social Media
Entry by Pat Patterson
We launched our blog in June, and every so often I will check our Google Analytics account to determine how many people visit our blog and how they find our blog in the first place. Today, I noticed a trend that somewhat surprised me – the majority of traffic to Indiana INTERNnation is directed from our social media marketing, more specifically Facebook.
This made me think – although all organizations and websites are different, if you are not using social media to market your organization, you are missing out on a large, free opportunity to increase your exposure. Specifically, I encourage all organizations to market your internship opportunities or at least links to your opportunities through your social media accounts.
Think about it – Facebook was created for university and college students, a majority of which use Facebook at least once a day. If you want …
Employers: Use Indiana INTERNnet to Find Your Fall Interns
Entry by Pat Patterson
Looking to hire fall interns? You can use Indiana INTERNnet www.workandlearnindiana.com for free to post internship opportunities in Indiana.
1. What are the advantages of using Indiana INTERNnet for my intern search?
Indiana INTERNnet is a free statewide system with students from 436 high schools and 84 colleges and universities throughout Indiana (the numbers continue to grow). With such a large number of students with diverse interests seeking internships through our database, your organization will gain greater exposure and gain a larger pool of qualified candidates to ensure you will acquire the best talent for your needs.
Indiana INTERNnet makes it easier to search for students. When seeking a specific type of student, employers can search for matches by utilizing any combination or all of the following fields: geographic preference, minimum GPA, job category, industry, and University. Employers may also post an unlimited number of internships.
…
Employers: Creating an Internship Description
Entry by Pat Patterson
Now that career fairs are approaching, it is important to have clear, detailed descriptions of the internship opportunities that you have to offer. Your internship description should include a brief overview of your organization, the intern responsibilities/duties, desired candidate skills, and any additional logistical details.
The following is an example of an internship description:
Marketing/Communications Intern*
Indiana INTERNnet is a business-education partnership between the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, Indiana higher education institutions and high schools, and Indiana-based employers to promote the quality and quantity of internship opportunities statewide. Indiana INTERNnet serves as the state’s online matching system connecting students and employers for internship opportunities. For more information about Indiana INTERNnet, visit www.workandlearnindiana.com.
Indiana INTERNnet is currently offering one paid internship opportunity to assist current staff members with internship activities.
Intern Responsibilities:
• Follow up with employers who have posted internships in the past to collect internship metrics and …
Greater Fort Wayne Chamber’s Graduate Retention Program
Entry by Pat Patterson
In last Monday’s blog entry, I provided a brief overview of the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber’s Graduate Retention Program, and the work that the retention team does to help decrease the Indiana “brain drain.”
In the following PowerPoint you can learn all about the Graduate Retention Program’s mission, strategies, and how the graduate retention team may be able to assist you:
Click to view PowerPoint Presentation
Southeast Indiana Economic Opportunities 2015 (EcO15) Initiative
Entry by Pat Patterson
As described in Monday and Wednesday’s blog entries, valued partners such as the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber’s Graduate Retention Program and the Southwest Indiana Education and Experience (E2) Initiative are using Indiana INTERNnet‘s technology platform to facilitate internship matches among students and employers.
To the southeast, another group, the Economic Opportunities 2015 (EcO15) Initiative is working with high school students to promote internship interest in the advanced manufacturing, tourism, and health care industries.
Here is a brief overview of EcO15:
Economic Opportunities through Education by 2015 (EcO15) is initially focusing on education and careers associated with Advanced Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Hospitality/Tourism for 10 counties in Southeastern Indiana. Counties include: Bartholomew, Dearborn, Decatur, Franklin, Jackson, Jefferson, Jennings, Ohio, Ripley, and Switzerland. Advanced Manufacturing is the value-added combination of people, processes, and products, which remains competitive in a high-wage environment in the pursuit of continuous improvement. Advanced Manufacturing …
Southwest Education and Experience (E2) Initiative
Entry by Pat Patterson
As I have stressed numerous times, internships are invaluable experiences for both students and employers. After Indiana INTERNnet was established, some regions realized the necessity to create their own additional programs to promote the significance of internships.
From a statewide perspective, Indiana internships are being promoted by Indiana INTERNnet and its regional partners. In Monday’s blog entry, I described how the Greater Fort Wayne Graduate Retention Program utilizes Indiana INTERNnet’s technology platform to facilitate internship matches among students and employers; The Southwest Indiana Education and Experience (E2) Initiative works to do the same in nine Southwestern counties.
Former Indiana INTERNnet intern, Anastasiya Elaeva, describes E2 in the August INTERNnetwork:
With just a few people on staff, the Southwest Indiana Education and Experience (E2) Initiative team, also known as the E2 initiative, has been enthusiastically working on boosting the region’s talent retention. Since its start in …
Greater Fort Wayne Graduate Retention Program
Entry by Pat Patterson
As I have stressed numerous times, internships are invaluable experiences for both students and employers. After Indiana INTERNnet was established, some regions realized the necessity to create their own additional programs to promote the significance of internships. From a statewide perspective, Indiana internships are being promoted by Indiana INTERNnet and its regional partners. Valued partners such as the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber’s Graduate Retention Program use Indiana INTERNnet’s technology platform to facilitate internship matches among students and employers.
The Graduate Retention Program is a business/education partnership facilitated by the Workforce & Business Development Division of the Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce:
The Graduate Retention Program is designed to attract and retain college and high school graduates in Northeast Indiana. Our strategy is to increase awareness of area employers by promoting the development of meaningful internships for college and high school students.
As Mike Landram, the Greater …
Keeping the Communication Lines Open After the Internship
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
Once your company’s internship ends, it’s important to make sure the communication does not end with it. Hopefully at the end of an internship, both a company and its intern are parting ways with a positive experience to look back on. And if everything goes as planned, both that company and the intern will want to work together in the future.
Most interns still have one, maybe even two or three, years of school left before entering the “real world.” So a company can go from communicating with their intern on a daily basis to not speaking to them for a year. But, a lot of things can happen in that last year of school – your intern may attend career fairs, have job interviews, and meet potential employers. How are you going to continue to stick …
The Benefits of Hiring an Intern (And how to avoid training candidates for your competitors)
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
digitalKnowledge strives to hire recent college graduates for their fresh perspectives and eagerness to continue learning. Our company tries to hire 2-3 Associate Consultants each year. A lot of on-campus recruiting occurs through career fairs, class presentations, and on-campus interviews. We hire talented, entrepreneurial graduates, but they come into our company with little to no real knowledge of our business.
Bart, our intern, has been with us for two months now, and while that may seem like a short amount of time, he is “one of us.” He knows about digitalKnowledge, our values, our processes – formal and informal, and he is part of our culture and environment. Through his time with us, he has sat in on client meetings, conference calls, and staff meetings. Not to mention, he sits next to three of our developers each day and has …