Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business

An Coppens

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783000098
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

Capture the best and brightest IT talent for your company.In the competitive IT hiring market, the best candidates are often snapped up by big companies before they even graduate, so what can you do to attract them to work for you? The new generation of IT graduates have their own values and each industry has specific recruitment techniques, and the savvy hiring manager needs to know about both in order to attract the very best graduates.In this practical guide, An Coppens gives hiring managers unique insights into the new generation of IT graduates and what helps them make their career decisions. Featuring examples of recruitment strategies that have worked for some of the great names in the IT industry such as Google and Microsoft, An translates their strategies into practical tips so you can implement them in your organisation's recruitment process.

Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business

---

Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business

Copyright © 2014 Impackt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Impackt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Impackt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Impackt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: February 2014

Production Reference: 1050214

Published by Impackt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78300-008-1

www.Impacktpub.com

Cover Image by Jarek Blaminsky (<[email protected]>)

Credits

Author

An Coppens

Reviewers

Chris Bresnahan

Sarah Mottram

Commissioning Editor

Nick Falkowski

Copy Editors

Jalasha D'costa

Maria Gould

Paul Hindle

Project Coordinator

Priyanka Goel

Proofreaders

Maria Gould

Paul Hindle

Simran Bhogal

Indexer

Hemangini Bari

Production Coordinator

Melwyn D'sa

Cover Work

Melwyn D'sa

About the Author

An Coppens is the Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation Ltd., where the vision is to make business and learning more fun and engaging. She is an award winning business coach, learning and development professional, author, and speaker.

With Gamification Nation, An offers consulting services and online learning programs to assist organizations with creating lasting experiences customers remember, by applying game psychology and game design techniques to non-game situations. She was recently ranked in the top 100 gamification consultants and innovators of 2013 with her Twitter alter ego @GamificationNat.

She is the author of Leading the boss in the mirror, a book that teaches people smart and practical ways to reduce their stress levels. This book was written with stressed executives and individuals in mind. In the book, she shares 15 years of client work and personal experience on how to deal with stress and reintroduce moments of calm back into your schedule.

She was a guest expert contributor on the RTE (Irish television) show How Long Will You Live? since its pilot series and continued to contribute throughout all the following series. Her clients nominated her for the European Coaching Achievement Award and proved to the European Coaching Institute that they had achieved lasting benefits from working with An as their coach.

She speaks and trains on the topics of gamification for entrepreneurs and learning, work-life balance, and leadership with passion and inspiration at conferences and in corporate settings. The feedback given at these events ranges from inspirational to making a tangible difference. She has worked with 100s of business owners, high achievers, and corporate employees to achieve a new level of skill in business development, mindset, leadership, and more.

She originally started B/Right Business Coaching in Cork, Ireland, to bring about a big business change knowledge to the small business sector, because prior to this venture An had worked with Xigma Management Consultants, Philips Electronics and Arthur Andersen Business Consulting, where she had learned big business strategies for both project management and change management. She holds a BA (Hon) in International Marketing and languages from Dublin City University and an MBA from the Open University Business School in the UK.

An is a prolific reader and will seek out further development with mentors and thought leaders worldwide to enhance her skills and improve her services for clients. She holds business and life coaching qualifications from the UK, the U.S.A., Australia, and Ireland, and is qualified as master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming. She is currently studying toward a diploma in game design and has recently added gamification designer to her qualifications.

She became the go-to person for business startups, business growth, and work-life balance and worked extensively with clients from the Cork city and county enterprise boards as well as Enterprise Ireland.

In 2010, An took on the new challenge of becoming an internal training consultant for the media industry with a position in Modern Times Group, a broadcasting group headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with the largest geographical footprint in commercial radio, television, and online TV. She quickly proved her capabilities by winning the Rookie Award in Modern Services with her Strengths Based Leadership training.

Contact An Coppens

www.ancoppens.com

www.gamificationnation.com

E-mail: <[email protected]>

Preface

Attracting top IT talent is a challenge, especially when big names in the IT world such as Google, Facebook, IBM, and EMC are snapping up the best candidates, either through innovative recruitment techniques or by pure reputation. In this book, we will guide you through ways in which you can implement their techniques in order to gain equal traction on your recruitment efforts.

Let's start by looking at what the industry's powerhouses are doing to attract the best recruits to come and work for them.

Google

Google ranked first—for the fourth time in a row—in the 2013 Fortune Top 100 Best Companies to Work For. Not only does the organization have a great reputation, but also their office spaces have featured in numerous magazines. Google's corporate lifestyle complements the organization and is made available to its staff. In fact, during their recruitment process, Google puts together a committee made up of existing employees, who check out the new potential hires on Google Hangout. What better way to be interviewed for a job with Google than by having a bunch of Googlers taking you through a series of interviews and testing your technical skills as well as checking how you think through a problem?

Google has a clear idea of the type of person that will thrive in their environment, so they will specifically look for them. When you first apply for a position, the recruitment team will contact you in order to provide you with more information on the role. Then, the person who works in a similar role will take you through a screening to find out more about you and what your expectations are in relation to the role and the organization. These initial steps are often carried out over the phone. Once you're invited to attend an interview at a Google office, expect to have five interviews in a day with some practical tasks related to your area of specialization. The main purpose of these interviews is to find out what you're passionate about in relation to technology and to determine your problem solving ability. When the group of interviewers recommends that you should be hired, feedback is given relatively quickly. However, you should expect anywhere between four and nine interviews; this is a reduction down from 12 to 14 interviews in some cases, or even as many as 29 interviews before getting hired. Before offering you the post, a number of decision making committees jump into action.

For Reference

Here are three links that illustrate Google's hiring process:

http://www.google.co.uk/about/jobs/lifeatgoogle/hiringprocess/

http://www.google.co.uk/about/jobs/lifeatgoogle/

http://www.businessinsider.com/infographics-process-of-getting-hired-at-google-2011-10

What attracts IT graduates to Google is its reputation for being a people-centered organization, where passion for innovation is blended with development opportunities, career growth, top-end design workspaces created to encourage creativity and collaboration, and its widely renowned benefits, from onsite massage to games rooms, sports arenas, onsite crèche facilities, and the list goes on.

Tip

Aim to be in the Best Companies to Work For shortlist in your community.

Facebook

Another great company to work for is Facebook. Even though the company didn't make it into the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2013, it maintains its meritocratic approach to hiring, which you may have seen in the movie "The Social Network" or in the book with the same title. The first technical employees earned their position by winning a coding competition, also known in the industry as a hack-a-thon or hack-fest. The competition element has remained within the recruitment process, and the starting point of the process is very similar to that of...

Table of contents

• Attracting IT Graduates to Your Business