Ask HN: How to hire fresh or recent graduates? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to hire fresh or recent graduates?

2 pointsnrao1234 comments

There seem to be quite a few articles talking about how the market is tough for recent college graduates. E.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/business/economy/19grads.html

We are looking to hire fresh/recent college graduates with pretty much no experience for sales positions with an adequate base and a very strong incentive structure. We are hiring for our niche industry focused SAAS products selling into enterprise customers.

However, we are struggling to attract & hire folks who show even a modest amount of determination with good communication skills.

What could we be doing wrong? Any tips/thoughts/advise on how to hire in this segment?

I thought "hiring recent college graduates with no specific experience requirements" will be in the "not so challenging" category of growing our business. But its apparently not that easy!

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Is your problem that you can't find people at all, or that the people you find are no good?

If it's the first, then you may not be advertising in the right places. If it's the second, then you may actually be staring away good candidates with the "no specific experience requirements".

I know that that sounds strange, but in a world where most people recruiting are asking for way more experience than they need (and in some cases is even possible), specifically asking for people with "no experience required" tends to throw up red flags for people who are expecting to apply for jobs which, on paper, they aren't actually qualified for.

I, myself, have seen plenty of jobs with copy along the lines of "No experience required", and every time it makes me wonder if they're either horrible employers (who can't attract skilled workers), or they're trying to scam me somehow (some recruiters like to place speculative job ads just to collect resumes).

We are getting resumes & setting up interviews and then find most people fall of in the interview process & the people who want to go ahead with suddenly get cold feet on the sales oriented jobs. We are using Indeed.com to get a lot of incoming resumes.

My first thought is to look for math, philosophy, economics, business management majors. Those jobs don't necessarily have such a direct path into the work place like mechanical engineering, accounting, or nursing. Friends I've had in those categories have a harder time finding jobs, especially if they have no experience.

Secondly, many of the people who work in sales that I know didn't stay long with school, because at some point they realized they could do well based on their hustle alone. College/university is often seen as a 'safe' bet, while dropping out and working as a commission based salesman isn't, so it attracts a different crowd. The recommendation is to then maybe not focus on recent, inexperienced college grads, but focus on sales people without industry experience who are willing to make a switch. Facebook ads could help target these, maybe?

We find that more experienced sales people are not a great fit to what we are trying to do since they don't get the tech part of our solution, more risk averse etc. We do offer a base + incentive model and not just a commission only model. We are major agnostic as long as people have shown some amount of determination to doing a sales job.

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