Here at Network Marketing we are in the final stages of our Graduate Recruitment Campaign for our Academy which starts in September 2014.  We were comforted to read this article about LinkedIn which looks at the impact graduate recruitment in 2009 had on the business. In short, during their start-up in 2009 LinkedIn struggled to attract the engineers they wanted to work for them, mainly due to the appeal of Google and Facebook at the time who were quite simply offering more in terms of working for an already established global company. After all their troubles hiring, LinkedIn decided to invest time in hiring interns 50% of whom were graduates straight from university. LinkedIn went from zero to 200 interns within a few weeks.  They used a simple “Do you want to be engineer number 50 at LinkedIn or number 7,000 at Google?” as their campaign.  These recruits were instrumental in helping the business grow to what is now considered one of the biggest Social Networks on the planet with a worth of $7.5bn, just from being given the chance.  The vast majority of the interns have remained with LinkedIn – and why wouldn’t they? We’ve had a number of discussions with clients over the past few months who are also hiring graduates, all believe now is the time to invest in new graduates. Whilst the return may take a bit longer than recruiting experienced members of staff, we’re all hoping that we’ll experience the same benefits as LinkedIn by focussing on developing a ‘home-grown team’ particularly  in terms of loyalty and retention. Incidentally, we have been really impressed with the quality of the 2014 Graduates we’ve been speaking to so if any of our clients would like any help identifying what we believe will be the marketing stars of the future then please give us a call.

CREDIT: GOOGLE IMAGES