Student Hiring: Why Not Make It An Event?

摘要

Managing student employees is like raising a family. Like most parents, seeing their child grow and move away to school is hard. One of the more difficult things about managing students is when you watch the employee, who you've seen change from student to adult, leave or graduate. For the ITS group at Iowa State University, this happens each semester. This spring we needed to fill twenty positions to be fully staffed for the fall. Before going through a number of applicants and interviews, we decided to take a different approach to the hiring process, so we made an event out of it. We offered a mass interview process and had twenty applicants respond. Once applicants arrived, we explained that they would be interviewing each other, based on the guidelines we had created, for a set amount of time. Then we divided them into small groups and put a current employee in each group that took notes on interactions and responses. The applicants who felt comfortable meeting new people and were able to carry a friendly conversation excelled. They were able to see potential peers and get a jumpstart on building work relationships. We found this form of hiring to be successful and extended an offer to about 50% of the applicants. We also found a few applicants that most likely would have been hired through the "normal" interview process, but did not blend well during the interview event, causing them to be taken out of the applicant pool.