Young Talent: The Benefits of Hiring College Students

Choosing who to hire is a difficult task. On one hand, the most experienced candidate will almost always be able to offer more in terms of raw output capability. But on the other hand, there are legitimate advantages to hiring younger people and people who are still in college. Especially if the position at hand is temporary, as is the case for summer jobs and part-time positions your company may choose to create in response to spikes in customer demands.

All this is to say that if you have never given serious consideration to hiring college students before, you should. Here are some of the benefits associated with hiring college students. 

1 - Lock-in talent

Let’s start with an easy one. If your company is in constant need of college-educated workers to stay ahead of the curve, hiring students is a great idea. Even if you are only using them to do odds and ends around the office and handle low-skill work, building that connection early on makes it much more likely that your company will be the first place they send resumes to after graduation.

There are a couple of reasons for that. One is just plain old familiarity — if a student knows that the work atmosphere in your company is relaxing and welcoming, they’ll gladly turn down even better-paying jobs just to work there. It just feels safer to work for a team you know than to work for total strangers, especially if working at your company also means that said student won’t have to relocate.

Gratitude is also a factor. If working for you helped a student get the money they needed to pay their bills or afford an essay writing service whenever they needed it, these students will be much more likely to have a positive view of your company after graduation. 

And of course, just as students will become familiar with your company by working with you, welcoming them to your offices will also allow you to learn more about them. This can help you single out the particularly smart and hard-working students early on, so you can track them down and make them a job offer after they graduate.

2 - Liven up the atmosphere

Young employees can do a lot for the atmosphere of a workplace, especially if they are excited about what they are doing and eager to learn. This is good for both the morale of other workers and for helping create a more welcoming atmosphere for clients. Of course, students won’t just be in a good mood 24/7, and you won’t always be hiring extroverts, so this should be seen as a minor potential benefit of having students around, rather than a certainty.

3 - Easy to find

Students who are looking for work will typically look for opportunities online. On top of that, news of companies looking for student talent will spread quickly through word of mouth on campus. There is even a chance that the campus staff or members of the student body are compiling lists of job offers for students somewhere online for other students to see. All of this makes it pretty easy to get viable job candidates from a local university, even if you need people on short notice.

4 - Get fresh ideas

The longer you stay in one company and one industry, the easier it is to stop paying attention to small everyday things that could be improved. But having young people around and training them to handle tasks around the company can help reveal those flaws and uncover processes that could be optimized. Not only because the students themselves will point these out, but also because the act of teaching forces you to look at what you’ve been doing in a new light.

Either way, having regular interactions with students like this can directly lead to fresh new ideas and flashes of inspiration. And ideas are actually a limited resource; just because it is hard to keep track of how many good ideas you have a week, it doesn’t mean that number isn’t finite. And there are long-term benefits to improving the number of good ideas going around on a weekly basis.

5 - Expand your network

Having students working in your company is a good way to expand your professional network. Your average college student won’t be terribly well connected in the industry, but they will graduate eventually. And if you stay in touch and keep tabs on their careers, you’ll very quickly build a network of former employees who have found work in your industry all over the world. It can help you stay connected.

This will work better if you make yourself an asset to those former employees, of course. Make sure you’re taking time to answer questions from them from time to time, and make it easy for them to get letters of recommendation from you, should they need one later in their careers.

6 - Get unique skills

Students aren’t necessarily blank slates. It might take some digging, but you can find students with previous work experience, or who have picked up some marketing, web design, computer repair, or customer service skills earlier in their life, either in previous jobs or due to one of their hobbies.

This makes part-time student workers useful when you have a specific need in your company that your current employees don’t have time to solve, but that it is nonetheless not major enough to warrant hiring a full-time professional. As is the case if you need someone to make sure files are properly backed up every day, for example, or if you need someone to make regular posts on your company’s social media profiles.

7 - Time flexibility

Many students choose to make cash through gigs and part-time work instead of committing to a full-time job. This means that if you build connections with local students, it can be much easier to rely on them as an extended part of your workforce. That’s because you end up meeting a few reliable people who will be willing and able to show up to help on short notice if you pay them extra for the trouble.

This can be useful whenever there is a spike in demand or an employee calls in sick on short notice. And since these are students who have worked for you in some capacity before, they’ll likely not need much training to get back in the swing of things.