Mark Zuckerberg, the young CEO of Facebook, conducted a very candid interview for Y Combinator’s startup school (video of the interview is down below). While he covered many interesting topics to those who are active entrepreneurs, he touched on one point that I found extremely interesting for college recruiting.
When asked how he keeps the environment at Facebook, Mark responded that they look for people who want to come help them in their mission. Facebook is not worried if they come for just a year, two years, or longer. He noted that companies like McKinsey Consulting and IBM had a track record of being great places for graduates to go if they wanted to get an MBA.
Mark said he wants Facebook to be “One of the best places where you can learn to build stuff.” He mentioned the successes of several Facebook alumni by name including Steve Chen who started working on YouTube before he left Facebook. Mark then went on to say that while he is not encouraging people to leave, Facebook is not pretending that they are building a company where hackers would want to stay forever.
This brings several large questions to mind:
1. How well does your company utilize intern and new graduate talent?
Are your new graduate hires learning the skills they need to succeed on campus, or in your training program. It seems like the large number of hires Facebook recruits are able to jump in rather quickly without the 6-18 month rotational program. While I realize that not every industry has this luxury, it still begs the question, how can your company work directly with universities to build relevant courses for the university students you are hiring. The more relevant the school courses are, the quicker your company can offer graduates the ability to contribute and make an impact.
2. What are the effects of promoting an alumni network when recruiting talent?
Promoting the alumni network works very well for business and law schools when attracting students. I have friends who graduated from top MBA programs such as Harvard, Northwestern and University of Chicago that say the people they met in school and access to the alumni were as important as the knowledge they picked up from classes. Showing how your company can be an incredible stepping stone could be a valuable asset when competing to hire the best talent. You constantly read about prominent alumni from companies like Ernst and Young, Google, and General Electric taking senior level positions at new companies. I think embracing this is a better recruiting tool, than hiding from it.
3. Do you actively promote the skills they will learn?
This brings up the question, how do you sell students on working at your organization compared to the college recruiting philosophy at Facebook? Do you have a list of skills that new college hires will learn during their first 6-12 months? I see many companies that have university recruiting informational pages talk about the day in the life of an employee. They talk about their responsibilities and path, but you rarely see anything that says, “I learned how to…” There was a recruitment ad for the US Army that spoke clearly about what they would learn. I think university recruiting needs to spell this out much better to the next generation of workers.
So here’s what I recommend taking away from these questions:
According to a 2008 NACE report, only 66% of new college hires are still with the company after 5 years. The figure in 1992 was 80%, and I would anticipate this steadily deteriorating as even the 66% sounds high compared to companies I have consulted. So if you have a third to half of your new college hires for less than 5 years, make the most of them. Whether it is their initial contributions they made during their stint, or marketing their successes as an alum.
I graduated from college in 1999 and took a position in the America One cell phone division inside Capital One. I was quickly frustrated with the level of red tape and saw my many suggestions get brushed aside. While I was there for only one year, a suggestion of mine was used, and I oversaw a customer conversion that saved the company $3 million a year. Throughout the conversion I picked up invaluable skills about learning how to better segment customers in both sales and retention. My brief year led me to network with another Capital One alum who later helped fund my first start-up. While I am sure my employer was not happy that I left after a year, I was still able to make a valuable contribution, and I believe my story could be a good sales pitch for future Capital One employees.
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