Founder in Eleven

A small firms’ initial growth typically comes from a network of people with some shared background, often a college or work/employer network.  TSG began our own journey with me as sole contractor for a large client.  As opportunities opened up at my first and second clients, I began to pull in different resources from my network at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).  Those resources pulled in their friends and acquaintances, and soon we had reached 7 employees by the end of the first year.  In TSG’s second year, we ran out of connections and leveraged head-hunters and other paid recruiting to introduce us to additional resources, many also coming in with background at Andersen Consulting.  In our third year, given the competitive market and our growth, we began college recruiting.  Eventually, TSG moved to have college hires as our primary employee acquisition strategy.  After 24 years, almost 80% of our staff (we were 50 at the time) started their career as TSG college hires.

As firms grow past 10 employees, founders should look for opportunities to reshape the recruiting, onboarding, and training processes to include college recruiting within their employee acquisition methods. 

Why College Recruitment?

Many firms can get stuck in the cycle of “just in time” recruiting, only hiring when they desperately need help after significant growth or employee departures rather than forecasting and planning for hiring throughout the year. “Just in time” hiring leads to only hiring experienced people , often times after other employees have left or the amount of growth has led to current staff being overworked. College recruiting, on the other hand, demands a solid plan as well as the foresight to hire employees after graduation, and making them employment offers often 9 months before they will start working.

Having worked with many IT services firms, I’ve noticed few small firms that take advantage of college recruiting.  Most small IT firms focus on finding more experienced resources that have already been trained at least 2+ years.  With a tightening job market and high competition for resources, those few innovative firms will look at college recruiting as a benefit in finding available resources and fostering a company culture that includes college graduates.  College recruiting truly embraces the “build versus buy” differentiator in establishing a consistent and reproducible methodology to recruiting, training, and retention.

The benefits of college recruiting include:

• Lower cost: Given the need to be trained, college hires are often significantly less expensive than experienced resources.  Also, the primary cost for college hires is the time it takes to recruit them rather than having to pay expensive recruiters.
• More availability: College hires need to find a job post-graduation and do not have to be enticed to leave their current job with larger salary or work environment demands.
• No bad habits: Often times, experienced hires can bring both good and bad experience.  IT services demands a level of quality to meet our clients’ expectations.  Experienced hires that are more used to a “cutting corners” approach can hurt the quality of the deliverables.
• Greater loyalty: College hires are grateful to the firms that took a chance on them and trained them.  College hires will typically stay longer at their first job than subsequent jobs.  College hires also do not have as extensive a network of co-workers from previous jobs to pull them to different jobs.
• Supporting the pyramid: For the existing staff, pulling in college recruits opens up new career growth potentials, like supervision and management roles for future projects.  Current TSG employees embraced the career opportunities of instructor, supervisor, and manager given the influx of inexperienced resources filling the pyramid underneath them.
• Giving back: Every professional got their start when a company hired them out of college.  Hiring, training, and mentoring college grads gives experienced resources the opportunity to give back to others like them, often times from their alumni colleges.

Culture – Why It Is So Important for College Recruiting and Retention

Building a culture-rich organization is key for retention, particularly with today’s younger college recruits.  While compensation is important, I would argue that the best long-term resources will sacrifice short-term compensation in favor of strong cultural components.  To put it bluntly, younger recruits want to work in a fun but challenging environment where they can have social connections to their co-workers.  I would routinely say that anyone at TSG could find a job that would pay them $10,000 to $20,000 more per year, but it was TSG’s job to make sure the company’s cultural benefits made it worth staying at TSG. 

Given a focus on culture as a key component in recruiting and retention, founders should be looking to recruit candidates that add rather than detract from company culture.  Keep in mind that good recruits will want training and professionalism, but also seek to find and maintain strong social connections (i.e. friends they make at work). 

One component I stressed in the early days of TSG was how to build an organization that would appeal to recruits.  For me, reducing mandatory traveling and overtime at TSG was an easy differentiator from my experience from Andersen/Accenture.  Later, other implemented culture components including ski trips, happy hours, mentors, employees-of-the week, and chili-cook-offs were all things that appealed to our employees as well as potential recruits.

How to Engage with College Recruiting

College recruiting requires extensive planning.  Here are some recommended key dates and activities:

• August – Sign up for college career fairs, typically in September.  Fall career fairs are the best way to hire both December and May graduates.
• September – Send alumni from your company to the college career fairs.  In deciding which colleges to pick, have your staff involved, as many will want to recruit others from their own school and will put in the effort to bring back good recruits.
• September to early October – On-campus interviews.  Despite the move to virtual career fairs with the pandemic, nothing is as good a substitute for both the recruit and the interviewer as face-to-face meetings.
• Late October to November – Office visits.  We would typically look to hire a class of 10 people.  On two different Fridays, we would bring 10-15 potential recruits into the office each Friday on two Fridays in October/November. 
• November – We would make between 15-20 employment offers with a plan of getting approximately 10 accepts.  More below on how to make the offers.
• February/September Start Dates –We typically started December graduates in February and May graduates early September.  We would also run the December grads through training again in September as leads/instructors so they could get to know the other new hires.

College Recruiting – “Secret Sauce” Thoughts

In the end, TSG was very successful in our college recruiting efforts. We not only acquired great new staff but also competed well against other firms that were offering more in salary and benefits.  Some of our secret sauce components included:

• Targeting schools and students: We were targeting schools where the graduates would embrace the opportunity to work at a small company in downtown Chicago and fit our culture.  We focused on large Midwest schools (Illinois, Michigan State, Michigan, Purdue, Notre Dame) as well a couple of small schools (DePauw, Bradley). 
• Hiring interns: We would typically try to hire one summer intern from each targeted school.  Summer interns give you the ability to “try it before you buy it” (in regard to the intern themselves) but also give you a voice on campus to other potential recruits about what kind of people you hire and what it is like to work for your company.  Given that the intern is representing your brand on campus, we were very selective over who would get the intern offer.  We recruited interns in the fall during our full-time, on-campus recruiting.
• Solid recruiting methodology: Over our 20 years of college recruiting, we developed consistent interviewing, ranking, and hiring methodologies.  While we focused on scenario-based interviewing, the more interesting “secret sauce” was how TSG ranked our recruits. We focused on the CCC methodology, or Chicago, Computer, and Culture:
  • Chicago – First and foremost, we wanted someone that was excited about working in Chicago.  During career fairs we would ask, “What are your thoughts on Chicago?”  A red flag was that they would “try it” but eventually wanted to move somewhere else (this would earn a 3 out of 10).  More favorable answers were folks that were excited about the big city (this would earn an 8–9 out of 10).
  • Computer – We were hiring for computer science graduates and needed to see that a recruit was good at computer science.  Rather than a stressful programming test, we would ask recruits to bring transcripts for on-site interviews and needed to see at least one “A” in a computer science class.  Alumni employees would help us judge grades based on their knowledge of their college’s program rigor.
  • Culture – We wanted to make sure we were offering jobs to those that fit into our culture.  Our favorite question to each interviewer was “If you went to lunch with the recruit, would it be a fun lunch with good conversations?” 
• Bowling night: On the night before the in-office visit by the recruits, newer employees would take the college recruits out for dinner and bowling.  While many recruits might be able to do well in multiple interviews, we found it very telling how recruits fit in with our team the night before the office visit, with an almost 100% success rate in being able to tell who would get offers and who would not.
• Ranking the offers: After the day of office interviews, we would bring in all the employees that had met with the candidates in the office.  We would total the three Cs and guess the candidate’s likelihood of accepting our offer (by %).  From the list, in ranked order by their three Cs score, we would work our way down until we had the number of recruits we needed ( e.g. if we wanted to hire 10 employees and the team thought each recruit’s likely acceptance was 50%, we would make 20 offers).  As founder, I would typically call every recruit to make the formal offer and give my own thoughts regarding their acceptance.  I found that having the company founder involved in the recruiting process gave us an edge against large firms, where recruits felt they were just a number.
• Calculating an appropriate salary: Salary calculation involved working with the recruits’ colleges, our employees, and the current market.  We always focused on paying the market rate rather than being the highest payer.  I never negotiated salaries (bad practice for colleges) as I thought it would lead to endless negotiations and, if employees compared offers, bad feelings for recruits with different salaries that were hired to do the same job.  When giving the offer, I would emphasize that we paid overtime, and that candidates would be getting a raise at the end of every year which added up as their career evolved at TSG.
• Start group: (See my post on College Recruiting and the Start Group.) During recruiting, we emphasized that we would be starting the class of recruits together to go through 2 weeks of TSG specific training with ongoing training throughout their career.  As it relates to the recruit, start groups help ease them into work while reducing stress, since it is a shared experience and good opportunity to make work friends.  For the company, the start group provides efficiency in training and the ability to plan work for the new hires around when training is complete.

Summary

College recruiting is something every small firm should consider as it can bring great financial and cultural rewards. Its only cost is the existing employees’ time compared to head-hunters and other pricy recruiting avenues that come with recruiting more experienced workers.