College Grads Aren’t Fitting Into the Job Market in Terms of Hiring

First, the good news: Corporations are on track to hire more recent college grads this year — up 5% versus last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers — making 2017 the eighth year in a row that companies have increased their entry-level college hiring.

But that’s not to say that many hiring managers are particularly happy about that fact.

According to a survey cited in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal — “Where College Seniors Are Falling Short” — more than 60% of employers feel that today’s recent college graduates are ill prepared for the professional job market, unfamiliar with the companies and industries they seek to enter and even falling down on simple steps like sending thank-you notes after interviews. A third of all applications for entry-level roles today come from unqualified candidates, the survey found.

“The mismatch extends to hard skills, too. Engineering, business and computer science majors are in highest demand, with at least two-thirds of employers seeking graduates in those fields, according to NACE. But fewer than half of the students surveyed by iCIMS majored in those subjects. College seniors feel good about their prospects: more than 90% of the students surveyed by iCIMS reported feeling confident about their interview skills. They also expect to earn over $53,000 in their first job, compared with average salary of $45,000 that recruiters expect to pay for those positions.”

Read the article at WSJ

Hiring: A New Reality

If you ask me, there are unrealistic expectations on both sides of this problem: Grads who expect too much from prospective employers (in terms of both compensation and hand-holding as they progress through their careers), and companies are expecting college students to jump in on day one with all of the skills that an experienced hire would have.

Both sides need to get real.

The truth is, traditional corporate hiring is misaligned with how Millennials discover products, services, and people. This is a generation that values personal growth, guidance, purpose and flexibility, in their day-to-day lives as well as their work, and corporate America isn’t yet offering that to them. Trouble is, there are currently more than 75 million members of the Millennial generation living in the U.S., making it the largest living generation.

This is a problem that isn’t going away anytime soon.

We at iSelect see the challenges of hiring a lot at the companies we invest in. These are small, high-growth, startup companies, the very definition of Millennial-friendly workplaces. And yet even they struggle to find qualified, affordable employees as they scale up and staff their businesses. Grads either don’t have the skills that these companies need, or they are looking for something that these employers cannot offer their hires.

One of these companies, Better Weekdays, has stepped up in an effort to reduce friction in the job search and campus recruiting process for students, colleges, and employers, with interactive, mobile enabled, marketing and communications platform provides tools and services, including self/career assessment and personalized job-matching. These tools allow students to discover relevant job opportunities, corporations to market their opportunities effectively, and university career centers to leverage data and analytics to improve graduates’ job outcomes.

It’s all about inbound recruiting. Rather than trying to reach out to as wide a range of potential candidates as possible, in the hope that at least one of them will make for a good hire, Better Weekdays’ philosophy is to help employers develop “pools” of interested, promising candidates ahead of time. This allows businesses to more quickly identify the most relevant and interested candidates, and minimizing the time spent searching through reams of less-than-optimal candidates. Better Weekdays has even streamlined this process in a product it calls The Whether, which automates the way companies attract, engage and hire students as part of a hands-off hiring journey.

Learn more about Better Weekdays

Consideration

With 2021 well underway and with public markets still strong, we think it is an important time to highlight some of the key private market, venture investment themes that iSelect fund has identified for the year. We believe technologies transforming the Agriculture, Food and Wellness markets will flourish, with a focus on four areas: technologies that enable better food choices to drive better health outcomes, technologies that drive better, more profitable farm operations, technologies that drive the Consumerization of Healthcare, and biome-based treatment technologies. At iSelect, we invest for impact AND performance. We offer qualified investors access to emerging growth companies through our national venture capital strategy. Our unique structure allows our investors to continue to invest in these companies as they develop.

Timing

Why is now the right time for venture? The answer is that now is not explicitly the right time. Venture is something we need in our economy at all times. Now is not better than any other particular time. The question is, why ever stop? When we look at the challenges we’re facing in food and healthcare the reality is there is someone, somewhere who has an insight about how to build a product that will solve those problems. And if they put the right resources to it, they will succeed. As long as we need new technology to make life better or make our lives more enjoyable, we need venture capital to help fuel those entrepreneurs.

What is iSelect as a product?

iSelect is a very unique product, but when you break it into its parts it’s fairly easy to understand. On the front end we’re a traditional venture capital fund. We have a diligence process. We have an investment process. We have categories of industries where we have focus and real expertise, and we invest in companies in those areas that meet requirements for the fund. On the back end we’re unique in that we don’t raise a large amount of capital at one time and deploy it over the life of our fund. Each deal that we bring onto the fund, our investors have to prove and determine to invest in that deal. We have to constantly prove our diligence standards. It’s accessible, transparent and easy for investors to come in and see our comprehensive process.

What is the ideal iSelect company?

We are looking for founders that are passionate and we want the problem they’re trying to solve to be big, real, and painful. We want the solution to be revolutionary and we want our capital to be able to help them solve that problem. We want to know that they have customers involved and that the solution they’ve come up with actually meets those customers’ and market needs. And we want the team to be capital efficient with the money they’re spending.

What does the ideal iSelect company look like?

We’re looking for a company that has an opportunity to have a 10x return to our investment or greater in a period of three to seven years. What excites us at iSelect are companies that are solving big problems. We want companies that are going to be the Monsantos of the future. Not just in the size and the scope, but the impact they have on people’s lives. We want to create positive impacts on people’s lives, so we invest in areas like agricultural production and areas like producing healthy foods for our kids. They are problems that impact real people’s lives on a daily basis. That’s what we’re trying to do at iSelect. We’re trying to solve the big problems out there. Find ways to bring capital to the entrepreneurs who are the real heroes out there getting up every morning, beating away at these things that are problems that you and me and everyone else faces in their everyday lives.

What is iSelect?

iSelect is a venture capital firm. What that means is we look at hundreds and hundreds of different companies and we apply tough diligence standards to each of them, looking at whether the team has a good plan for growing the business, whether the team is qualified and credible, and more. We do that to resolve the few who provide the best opportunities for investors. And then iSelect takes that smaller set of investments and goes to investors who are interested in venture capital and provides a way for them to invest in these companies, either individually or all at once. We co-invest alongside other venture capitalists. We source transactions through to an exit where the company would become public or get bought. And we manage that whole investment process on behalf of our investors.

College Grads Aren’t Fitting Into the Job Market, and Here’s Why