Member Article

How to set up an SME graduate scheme

With more and more SMEs taking on graduates, apprentices and placement students, more and more business owners are asking us ’“how do you go about setting up a graduate scheme”?

We love this question because we think it’s important to think about graduate employment formally and with a purpose. This is in contrast to bringing on a graduate to fill a short term gap at a discount.

Graduates are clever, savvy, ambitious and hard working. So many of them just need the opportunity to prove themselves so it is important to treat them as valuable members of the team, not as an extra pair of hands.

That said, many can be inexperienced so it’s important to find the balance between ‘give it a go’ and ‘here’s how I would approach it’ to help them overcome the initial culture change from University to business.

So, for that reason, let us share a few ideas for setting up a market leading graduate scheme that works in the SME market:

Put the basics in place:

SMEs are often competing with the pull of the FTSE 250 graduate schemes. To provide a competitive offering, you could think about the following:

• Consider the structure of your graduate scheme: will the graduate be doing one specific role or will they be rotating around teams / projects? Put this into words and turn it into a fancy PDF or one pager on your web site to show you’re serious.
• Write a detailed role profile for your graduate and document the behaviours you expect. This will help to ensure everyone is clear on expectations and is the foundation for performance success.
• Create a performance management structure. At its simplest level, this could be a rating scale of 1-5; 5 being poor and unacceptable and 1 being outstanding and exceptional. Then, write a few bullets as to what achievements / behaviours constitute each rating. You can then rank each piece of work / each objective delivery on this scale to give the graduate a baseline for improvement.
• Identify a manager in your business who cares about personal development; someone who has the patience to teach as well as tell.
• Think about what you could offer in terms of monthly performance reviews or coaching with other members of your team and include this in any documentation, particularly online and as part of your induction pack.

Here is an example of a scheme we recently built with Bede Gaming, and one for Nacco Materials Handling Group (Hyster and Yale brands).

Get the incentives right, even on a budget:

Between the prpa and Gradvert, we have hired four graduates of our own in the last two months. Each of them has started on a three month fixed term contract and each of them has benefitted from University funding, allowing us to bolt an extra £2,500+ on to their salaries.

Graduates don’t expect the earth and the funding available can make it so much easier to provide a decent salary between £14,000 and £18,000.

Remember, graduate incentives go way beyond the financial aspect. Here are some ideas to incentivise your graduates to work for you:

• Offer performance based bonus or rewards, particularly in sales roles. One of our graduates has the opportunity to triple his salary through his bonus structure.
• Feature their personal profile & photo on your web site to show you’re serious about their role in your company: show them they are part of the team and showoff the expertise you have added!
• Invite them to attend meetings with you and expose them to the running of the company to show them what they could be doing in the future and to broaden their understanding of the operations.
• Ask them for ideas (rather than ‘tell’ them yours all the time) to show you value their opinion. Chances are they’ll come up with some golden ideas…our graduates do!
• Get the balance right between administrative tasks and exciting projects. Graduates shouldn’t be treated as PAs or worse, as people to run your personal life (we’ve heard it happens). Give them meaningful work that contributes to your company and watch them grow!

Make yourself findable to graduates:

Lately, we’ve heard local business owners saying ‘we just can’t find the right talent’ themselves and they can’t afford recruiters so they give up. Quite often this is because they haven’t looked, dare we say! It is really important to make yourself findable to graduates if you want to attract the best applications. Here are some ideas for doing just that:

• Post the vacancy on your web site but make it part of a graduate specific page outlining the career prospects and including that fancy PDF from point 1.
• Send your vacancy to the local Universities. They’ll post it on their web sites for free! Yes, free!
• Use social media to extend the reach of your vacancy. On Twitter, for example, you could use #graduateschemes and #graduatejobs. We’ve set up localised accounts nationally to help. Try #NEGrads, #NWGrads, #MidsGrads, #SWGrads and #SEGrads to reach local graduates. @Gradvert will always Retweet for free.
• Jump onto Linked In and post your vacancy into graduate groups. If you search ‘graduate jobs’ etc in the groups section you’ll see a whole host pop up!
• Add your job to Gumtree (it’s free), Indeed (it’s free) and any other local sites which offer free postings!

Don’t forget to pay attention to your graduates. Hold regular review sessions to give and receive feedback and keep the communication going.

Good luck!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Gradvert .