What Do Students Want in a Job? [Insights Report]

Nearly 2 million students will graduate with bachelor degrees this year in the U.S. alone and start looking for a job. Most of them are going to stay at their first job no longer than 24 months. With those facts in mind, how do you find and hire the best and brightest of this huge pool of possible candidates?

To help you with this, the LinkedIn Insights team has put together a report revealing where you should look for recent grads and how you can attract them to your company.

Here are some highlights from the report:

• Compensation and benefits are still the #1 attraction for recent graduates
• There are several “hidden gem” geo locations you should consider when looking for recent grads
• Students and recent graduates are LinkedIn’s fastest growing segment

Read the full report here:

For further inspiration, here are three effective ways to connect with students and recent graduates on LinkedIn:

• Post your jobs. I can hear you saying “I don’t want more volume…”  and I get it! But because LinkedIn Student Jobs operate by way of a finely tuned relevance and recommendation engine, it is more likely you will see an excellent candidate will apply, more times than you will complain about “too many applicants” Oh, and posting on Student Jobs is free.

• Investigate untapped markets. Use LinkedIn’s insights to discover “untapped” markets such as Charlotte, NC, Austin, TX, and Phoenix, AZ where competition for top graduates is less than over saturated markets. Remember with recent graduates where they are attending school and their preferences are not always correlated. Connecting the dots between these hidden gem geographies.

• Communicate with students. LinkedIn allows you to search, target, and communicate with 100M alumni and 30M students and recent graduates by geo, school, degree, field of study, graduation dates, groups and more. If you want an example of how we serve up data around career outcomes check out the LinkedIn Alumni Tool. And here you can see the LinkedIn penetration by school:

Finally, if you are recruting on campus or at job fairs, take a look at CheckIn, a mobile app that radically simplifies how recruiters collect and manage candidate information at events.

* image by Penn State