How Graduates Drive Innovation in Smaller Businesses

Graduates offer tremendous potential when it comes to scaling and innovating businesses. But while large corporations have no trouble marketing their graduate opportunities, smaller businesses tend to suffer due to a lack of experience, reach, budget and resources.

With over 99% of businesses in the United Kingdom being considered small and midsize enterprises, this is a lot of untapped innovation and potential that is going to waste. Hiring new graduates comes with a plethora of advantages, and more businesses need to start gearing towards this by changing their recruitment strategies and working with local universities to create new opportunities that reflect SME’s as an appealing place to start a graduates early career.

How do graduates benefit smaller businesses?

Smaller businesses tend to avoid hiring graduates due to a lack of experience. In fact, a 2017 analysis of Linkedin showed that of 4 million job listings, 35% of the entry-level positions asked for years of prior relevant work experience. This is unreasonable to expect of graduates who are often the target for entry-level positions. However, this doesn’t mean that graduates should be immediately rejected due to a lack of experience. There are many benefits that come with hiring graduates.

Having just left academic life, graduates tend to be a lot more receptive to learning new skills. They’re also enthusiastic about their prospects and are ambitious to achieve success. Graduates understand that job opportunities are difficult to find, particularly in today’s business environment, so they tend to make the most out of the chances they’re given.

While many graduates lack experience in specific fields, they possess strong soft skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, communication, creative thinking, and have expertise in modern technologies. It creates the perfect candidate for any SME because they’re willing to learn and go the extra mile in their first job. This also creates a sense of loyalty because they’ve been given a chance to kick-start their career. If the business can provide a sense of fulfillment and give the graduate a chance to contribute their ideas, it creates a strong working relationship.

Hiring graduates as a smaller business

It’s important for smaller businesses to change the way they market their job opportunities if they want to appeal to new graduates.

• Update your recruitment and marketing channels. There are still many small businesses that use old marketing and advertising channels such as print media. While this can be effective in some cases (such as local opportunities) it pales in comparison to the exposure that digital marketing receives. Social media advertising and online job platforms create many new opportunities for a job listing to get noticed.

• Understand what graduates want from an opportunity. Salary packages, benefits, and opportunities to progress are all important for graduates, but there are also other factors to consider too. Graduates tend to prefer a good social community in a small business, flexible working location and hours, and they want to know that their role will make a difference. They also seek opportunities to contribute their ideas in a way that will be heard, and hopefully create greater value within a team and project.

Changing to modern recruitment methods and targeting graduates can be fairly straightforward, and it’s one of the best ways to prevent a stagnating business that desperately needs fresh ideas to grow, expand and stay ahead of the competition.