Insider Guide to Hiring for Entry-Level Positions

As the workforce continues to become younger, your company can keep pace and make the most of the continued change by knowing how to effectively find the diamonds in the rough that is the entry-level talent pool

Be it in start-ups or big corporations, entry-level talent are an essential aspect of any business. Armed with youthful exuberance, junior employees often help in the improvement of operational procedures, offering fresh ideas that contribute to long-term success. From an overhead standpoint, they command lower salaries whilst still being relatively skilled, as well as are adaptable and trainable, with potential to grow within the company ranks.

Although employing entry-level talent is now rather common as a result of Millennials now all being part of the workforce, and the succeeding Generation Z not far behind, filling junior positions continue to be a challenge for many employers.

For some, this is a result of their over-focusing on executive recruiting and hiring senior personnel and thus not being familiar with hiring and working with other talent. For others, finding qualified candidates in a sea of applicants continues to not be the easiest task, particularly because most young professionals have little experience to speak off.

Like in generations before however, today’s intern can be tomorrow’s company cornerstone, and to better ensure that your organization does not miss out on today’s wave of young talent is to look beyond their degrees and lack of experience, whilst recognizing their skills and engaging them through the means which they are most familiar with.

Create job posts that are targeted and engaging

With the exception of people who are switching professions, fresh graduates or those with overall work experiences are typically those who apply for entry-level positions. It is therefore important to keep in mind that your job posts may be the first true impression these candidates have of your brand and/or company, so you’ll have to make sure your posts are designed to appeal to them and have you stand out from rival employers.

Create job posts that are fun and easy to read, while being informative about the experiences they’ll have with your company. On Kalibrr, communicating this is made easy, as you can use bullet points to break down the qualifications you are looking for, the value your company provides applicants, and what opportunities they have to learn and develop. Remember to keep the use of fancy jargon to a minimum, as too much technical terms could be confusing and have them clicking the “back” button to leave your job post.

Use social media and other online platforms to target and gauge young talent

As mentioned, to gain a better understanding of young professionals’ abilities is to go beyond their relatively empty resumes. Social media is one such avenue to look, as many young professionals today often look to the internet as a place to showcase their work. Some examples include photographers showing off their work on dedicated Instagram accounts, developers uploading programs on Github, and designers creating portfolios on Behance.

Conversely, many young professionals also look to social media to discover career opportunities, just like how they use it to get recommendations on where to travel, receive the latest news and headlines, and do research on products before purchasing. Targeting young talent becomes easier with Kalibrr, as all your Kalibrr job posts are automatically syndicated to Jobs on Facebook, Job Search on Google, and LinkedIn, saving you from posting jobs repeatedly, but making sure young talent can easily find you.

Measure their skills and competencies with custom assessments

While resumes are helpful in sorting out talent, the information it provides is limited, and in other cases overstated. While some candidates undersell their achievements on their resumes, others stretch the truth a little, appearing more skilled than they actually are and are sometimes even hired based on merits that may not actually true. In these instances, gauging skills and credentials are best achieved via asking questions and having candidates take assessments.

Tests and other measures continue to be the answer for companies looking to identify all four important aspects of candidate selection: experience, qualifications, soft skills and potential. Along with help identify these soft skills that are now deemed just as, or even more, important than experience and education, new online assessment tools and credentialing also allow companies to gauge more candidates in significantly shorter amounts of time.

At Kalibrr, this is by way of the Custom Questions and Assessments features included with every employer account. When hiring via the platform, you are provided the option of being able to include custom questions and/or assessments with every job post you create, allowing you to effectively gauge the skills of all candidates who apply, even fresh graduates who may not have the experience you want, but qualify for the job and look like a good fit for your company by displaying the talents and characteristics you are looking for.

In terms of recruitment, you also won’t need to wait for job candidates to answer your assessments, as Kalibrr also features built-in assessments which fresh graduates and other users can voluntarily take, effectively allowing them to showcase their skills, as well as giving you additional signals about their capability to perform certain job functions and help effectively narrow down your search.

To learn more about Kalibrr’s Custom Questions and Assessment features, contact Kalibrr today.

Kalibrr is a technology company that aims to transform how candidates find jobs and how companies hire talent. Placing the candidate experience at the center of everything it does, the company continues to attract the best talent from all over, with more than 2 million professionals and counting. Kalibrr ultimately connects these talents to companies in search of their next generation of leaders.

The only end-to-end recruitment solutions provider in Southeast Asia, Kalibrr is headquartered in Makati, Philippines, with offices in San Francisco, California and Jakarta, Indonesia. Established in 2012, it has served over 18,000 clients, and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful start-up incubators and venture capitalists. These include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Patamar Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

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