Students – The Many Month Interview
The purpose of students is recruiting for full time employees. Their work terms are their interview. At the end of the term, you will have a good idea if they would fit into your organization.
Many companies have a probationary period, but it is usually not long enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the employee. With students, you have a 4 to 18 month term. Students will leave at the end of the term unless you ask them to stay. Full timers stay at the end of the probation term unless you ask them to leave (which usually tones of paper work).
Many people say, students are cheap. I would say that this needs to be clarified. Students are a cheap way to recruit new hires, but expensive when you factor in training from your full timers. Here are some of the costs associated with hiring students:
-
Resume Reading – I’ve found that marks are not necessarily the best judge of future work place performance. There have been many good people I’ve worked with who have had mediocre marks. The reason I bring up marks is that the filers offered by the schools for the employers are typically useless, resulting in a huge pile of resumes. Multiply this by the number of schools you are hiring from, then you start to see that this starts to add up.
Interviewing – The interview process for students goes much faster than full timers, but you will still need to dedicate half a day to a full day depending on the number of schools and candidates that have been selected.
Work Plan – With most students, I spend time to create a work plan for the term. This plan contains the training plan, ramp up information, and outline of their work for the term. This plan will be added as a template to the template section.
Training – People must be assigned to train this new resource, not manuals. This training (or interruptions) of your regular team members daily activities will reduce their productivity.
Salary – The salary of the student is lower than your full timers. Make sure to talk to accounting if you are in a small company as there may be government grants available to help subsidize their salary.
Now that you’ve got the student, it is important to give them real work. No one enjoys make work projects. The purpose of the student is to help determine if they are material to be a full time hire. This is best evaluated by giving them work just as if they were a regular employee.
Once the work term is over, you should have a good idea if they would make a good full time hire. When you bring this person on full time, their is much less risk and training.
Note: On the government student hiring incentives, there are many strings attached. Ensure that the accounting department doesn’t dictate that the new hires must qualify for the program. I have seen some programs structured so that a student who is in a coop program is unable to qualify as a new student hire because the qualification formula used involves number of hours worked over a period (which can be exceed by those in a coop program).
Comments
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
