More employers seek to hire non-traditional students to improve their diversity

There are millions of employers in the U.S., but the vast majority of them have between one and three employees. Tens of thousands are large enough to hire at least one intern, but almost all of the attention is paid to the hundreds who hire dozens to hundreds. 

I’m excited about the shift amongst employers like the Central Intelligence Agency to using productivity as their key metric of recruiting success instead of more traditional and less meaningful metrics such as hires per school or even cost-per-hire. Getting butts in seats is not a business goal, but building a productive workforce is. 

That said, a rapidly increasing minority of employers are shifting from an on-campus, school-by-school approach where they’re only willing to consider juniors and seniors from a small number of elite schools to a more diverse and inclusive early careers approach which welcomes those who have the demonstrated ability to do the work. These employers are very likely to welcome into their workforce students who are enrolled in community colleges, are transitioning out of the military, or otherwise are what many employers refer to as “non-traditional”. 

So, let’s say that you want to improve your diversity hiring by reaching out to more non-traditional students. Will you find them through your on-campus interviewing efforts at traditional, four-year schools? Nope. Where will you find them? Where they are. You need to get the right opportunity (your job requisition) in front of the right candidate (non-traditional student) at the right time (when they’re searching for a job like yours). How do you do that? By advertising that job on a site like College Recruiter.

At College Recruiter, we believe that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. Our customers are primarily Fortune 1,000 companies, government agencies, and other employers who hire at scale, meaning dozens or hundreds. These organizations advertise their part-time, seasonal, internship, and entry-level jobs with us to help them hire students and recent graduates of all 7,400+ one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities.