Contrary to popular assumptions, research shows that knowledge and expertise increase across the human lifespan—well into our 80s. As people continue to live longer, healthier lives, the portion of the workforce age 55 or older is projected to increase faster than other age groups. Still, older workers not yet ready to retire have been pushed out of the workforce at a steady rate due to widespread misperceptions about this age cohort.

This means hiring seniors could be the solution to filling that position you just can’t seem to find a good fit for. Are you having trouble finding part-time help? Workers 65 and older are twice as likely as younger workers to work part-time.

Not only are workers age 55 and older under-recruited, but hiring them comes with unique advantages:

• Older workers stay in jobs longer and take less time off.
• By providing unique perspectives and cognitive diversity, multigenerational teams perform at a higher level than teams made up of only younger workers.
• Workers with more experience can help mentor less experienced employees.
• Older workers tend to give customers more focused attention, which can help attract more business.

Tips for Finding and Recruiting Older Workers

A growing percentage of American workers say their plans include working after retirement. For many this may mean a part-time position or consulting work. For others, this may mean coming out of retirement and returning to work full time—but only for the right opportunity.

So how do you find and attract older candidates?

• Consider partnering with a senior employment network, such as the AARP Foundation’s Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), aimed at hiring seniors.
• Mention age diversity as part of your DEI policy initiatives, in a prominently displayed mission statement on your web site and in all job listings.
• Show older employees working with clients in your promotional media and tell stories about older employees succeeding at your company in social media and on your web site.
• Offer flexible work schedules and other accommodations, and make sure to mention this in job notices.
• Follow the example of large corporations like Walgreens and GM by offering “returnships” that encourage seniors to come out of retirement.

Tips to Avoid Ageism in Your Hiring Process

A successful age neutral recruitment strategy starts with recognizing stereotypes about older workers for exactly what they are—an illegal form of discrimination based on false assumptions. For example, many recruiters believe that older workers are less adept at technology, , or are less ambitious than younger workers.

Evidence indicates otherwise. In fact, older workers out-perform less experienced workers in many areas. To attract top-quality seniors to your organization, you first need to eliminate ageist language and practices from your hiring processes. Since workers older than 40 are a protected category of workers, not taking this important step could place you in violation of the Age Discrimination Employment Act (ADEA).

Follow these steps to overhaul your employment practices of ageist practices and improve your chances of hiring seniors:

• Inventory your company’s processes and practices using a benchmarking tool like the one created by AARP and Boston College’s Center on Aging and Work.
• Scrub your application process of questions that might reveal the age of the applicant, such as date of birth or graduation, particularly if these fields in an automated application don’t allow applicants to decline to give an answer.
• Eliminate ageist language, such as “digital native” or “recent college grad,” from job descriptions.
• Make sure your hiring committees are age diverse.
• Avoid thinking of candidates as “overqualified” or using this term during an interview or as you talk about and review the merits of candidates.
• Peg salary offers to job titles and work functions, rather than tenure, to avoid eliminating older applicants based on the assumption that they will demand too high a salary.

How to Make the Most of Senior Workers’ Experience

Older workers should be considered, and actively recruited, for a wide range of work functions. Don’t just think of seniors as good candidates for part-time, low-stress jobs—even though they definitely can excel in such roles. The most effective employment strategy includes hiring seniors in both part-time and full-time roles, including meaningful and important jobs throughout your organization.

Some of the most effective ways to leverage the unique talents of older workers include:

• Tapping into their expertise and their well-developed interpersonal skills, as can be seen in some of the most common part-time jobs held by seniors, such as office managers, retail sales, administrative assistants, paralegals, secretaries, and security guards.
• Creating formal cross-generational work partnerships or giving older workers more informal mentoring roles within your organization.
• Placing seniors in retail roles where research shows they are often viewed by customers as more helpful, attentive, and well-mannered than other service workers.

Now That You Know Why and How to Hire Older Workers, Get the Word Out With a Free Job Listing

If you’re looking to reach untapped talent and attract top applicants, a free job post from Monster can help extend your reach. Regardless of whether you’re hiring seniors, recent grads, or anyone in-between, your next high-performing employee is out there—make sure they can find you.

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Successful employers meet the strongest, most sought-after candidates where they are: on social media, on campus, and in the market for internships before graduation. The following five steps can help strengthen your recruitment strategy, improving your chances of hiring the best new graduates available.

1. Use Social Media 

Most employers routinely scour candidates’ social media accounts as part of their screening process. But an increasing number use social media platforms to engage with undergraduates. Social media is an effective, efficient, and inexpensive way to further your company’s new graduate recruitment efforts.

Consider hosting virtual events, joining industry groups, and posting informative career-focused videos. Highlight new accomplishments, explain how your product is made, and respond to comments and direct messages in a polished, professional, but enthusiastic tone that reflects your workplace culture.

Be strategic. Don’t try to do everything at once. Instead, ask your younger employees how they learned about your company and what prompted them to apply and how you can strengthen your social media efforts.

2. Collaborate With College Career Centers

One of the best ways to strengthen your new graduate recruitment process is to develop relationships with universities and colleges. Use sources like the National Center for Education Statistics to determine which institutions have strong programs in your field, and then reach out to their career centers. You may also choose to sponsor campus events, have top executives speak on campus, and attend campus career fairs.

Forming relationships with administrators and faculty will encourage them to recommend their top graduating students to you. Working with career centers or academic programs to set up internships can help create a pipeline of motivated students who just might end up being top performers down the line.

3. Emphasize Your Company Values

Gen Z is the most ethnically diverse generation yet, and this includes college graduates. Research points toward Gen Z being more values-focused than previous generations. But this doesn’t mean that they all have the same values. For some graduates work-life balance will outweigh sustainability; for others, a workplace that offers ample opportunity for community engagement may be more appealing than a few extra dollars a week in their paycheck.

The trick is to be authentic and communicate the values that matter to your organization. Don’t try to pander to theirs. Today’s graduates are savvy, and one thing they won’t find appealing is inauthenticity. Instead, use social media platforms to highlight what makes your company special with creative stories about community service projects or sustainability initiatives.

4. Promote Your Professional Development Initiatives

Attract ambitious candidates by showcasing your professional development initiatives in your job descriptions, on your career site, at new graduate recruiting events, and during the hiring process. For example, you may want to highlight your mentorship programs, internal training programs, professional development stipends, and your clear and equitable employee promotion process.

5. Develop a Fellowship Program

Only a small percentage of graduates currently opt for fellowships or similar short-term employment options during the first six months after graduation. However, evidence suggests more young workers would do so if more were available. Make your new graduate recruitment offering stand out by creating paid fellowship programs.

Offering paid post-graduate internships or fellowships allows employers to get a better sense of which new hires will work out in the long term. Without much of a work record, it’s hard to make permanent hiring decisions based almost entirely on new graduates’ potential as evidenced by a one-page resume and a couple of interviews. For just-graduating job applicants, it can be stressful to make a long-term commitment during one of the most drastic periods of transition they will ever face. A limited work commitment leaves them—and you—with multiple options.

If things go well during the trial period, they can accept a permanent offer from you. Many talented temporary hires will opt to go to graduate school, but that’s okay too. If they have a good experience, they’re likely to return to you when they complete their studies, more credentialed than they were before.

Get the Tools You Need to Develop a Successful New Graduate Recruitment Process

Today’s graduates are entering a quickly shifting job market, one that will make it harder than ever for employers to find and attract the right candidates for the right opportunities. Monster’s New Grad Hiring Guide can help you recruit top talent.

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Ready to learn how to create your internship program? Let’s get started. There are five steps in every internship program setup:

1. Identify your business needs
2. Recruit interns
3. Consider your legal obligations
4. Manage your interns
5. Evaluate and iterate

1. Identify Your Business Needs

The first step in creating your internship program, identifying your business needs, is easy enough. Results-based management means clearly defining your end goals so you can accurately create a path to achieve them.

Why do you need interns? Is this for a particular program or initiative, or are you just filling staffing needs moving forward? If the former, you can lock down budgets and timeframes at the outset. If the latter, you’re looking for a dynamic internship framework that can scale over time.

2. Recruit Interns

Recruiting interns takes a special set of considerations since you’re competing with other companies for  availability. Job fairs, hackathons, and other contests are ways to meet interns you might not otherwise encounter.

Remember: You are looking to fill a specific role, for a specific and limited amount of time, with the hopeful upshot of building a working relationship that can last past the internship itself. Within that framework, you should interview as carefully and stringently as you would your potential full-timers.

There needs to be a values fit, with clear and mutually agreed upon tasks. You’re looking for hard workers, eager learners, and future leadership potential.

3. Consider Your Legal Obligations

While most internships are paid, some interns—particularly those in an exploratory or observational role, or those who do not contribute meaningfully to work product—may legally be unpaid.

Unpaid internships are allowed under unique circumstances, determined primarily by whether the intern (and not the employer) is the primary beneficiary of the arrangement.

While state laws regarding internship programs may vary, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) employs a 7-step test to decide whether interns are entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay. Among other considerations, this test determines the extent to which an internship program “provides training that would be similar to that which would be given in an educational environment” and whether the intern’s work “complements, rather than displaces, the work of paid employees.”

4. Manage Your Interns 

A successful internship program should provide an orientation, plenty of training, networking opportunities, and ongoing supervision. It’s best to use the internship to expose the newcomer to as many aspects of the business as they seem interested in or have shown a talent for.

5. Evaluate Your Internship Program

If you plan to use your new internship program to drive hiring, use evaluations from managers to assess whether the intern would be a good match. After the internship, be sure to maintain contact. Make your job offer as soon as possible, since many of today’s students receive multiple job offers upon graduation. High-performing interns should automatically be considered for new unheard of and it’s not unheard-of to create new positions for just the right fit.

Learn More Expert Hiring and Management Advice

Whether you’re curious about how to create an internship program, actively searching for good interns, or just looking to hire a new employee with solid internship experience, Monster’s expert advice and hiring tips can help.

This article is not intended as a substitute for professional legal advice. Always seek the professional advice of an attorney regarding any legal questions you may have.

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We live in a knowledge-based economy where businesses with the best talent win. And since more and more companies are relying on internships to recruit superstars at the entry-level, there’s an ever-increasing need to develop internship programs that can evaluate a candidate’s true potential.

“For us, internships have never been about bringing a bunch of college kids in to make copies and coffee,” said Rick Slater, managing member for Dixon Hughes, an accounting firm that employs 35-50 interns each summer. “We consider the program an 8-week job interview.”

Structuring Your Internship Program
Slater isn’t alone. For most organizations, the main objective of their internship program is to convert talented grads into full-time employees. However, this doesn’t have to be left to chance.

As internships have become more sophisticated, so have the strategies designed to measure their success. When starting your own program, think about how many interns you can realistically keep busy for the program’s duration.

Once you have an official head count, it’s time to develop a series of measurable benchmarks. For example:

• Number of FTEs (full-time employees) from the program.

• Number of evaluations per intern from project supervisors. As a rule, interns should work with multiple managers. This will give you a broad range of feedback while allowing your newer staff to test-drive their leadership skills.

• Number of projects completed per intern. While difficult to quantify, you want to factor in a few projects that test your interns’ ability to think critically and work in teams. Of course there will be times when interns are required to “make copies and coffee,” but don’t fall into the all-too-common trap of using your interns for grunt work only. Give them a balance of meaningful work and administrative tasks and see how they handle both.

After you complete the benchmarks for your program, refer to them often to ensure you’re staying on course. “You have to keep going back to those original metrics,” said John Flato, President of the consulting firm Campus Strategic Partners. “Otherwise, how will you know if you’re succeeding?”

Finding Intern Candidates
Now that you have a skeleton in place regarding program benchmarks, it’s time to find your intern program’s candidates. Since no single approach works for everyone, the best method is to try a few different tactics and see what sticks.

Naturally, you can post available positions on sites like Monster, where they can be displayed on MonsterCollege, but you can also reach out to your local colleges and universities as well.

“Identify a handful of schools in your area and just call them up and tell them what you’re looking for,” said Ross Herosian who directs 150 interns per year at SIRIUS XM Radio. “You can also host an information session on campus. You may only have a few people show up, but those who do will be passionate about your industry.”

Career fairs are another great place to meet potential candidates, but if you don’t have the time or the budget for on-campus recruiting, you can ask faculty members for the names of their best students.

Finally, don’t forget about the power of Web 2.0 in recruiting. A dedicated “careers” webpage, Facebook profile, and Twitter account can be very influential megaphones when it comes to raising awareness of your opportunities.

Efficiently Onboarding
When it comes to orientation, the best companies have — at minimum – a series of team-building activities, a ‘basics’ overview so interns know what to expect, and an appearance by key players in their organization.

Also, don’t forget to include some good, old-fashioned Professionalism 101 training. “We take for granted that students should know how to dress and behave properly at work,” says Herosian. “But, like it or not, this is often what will teach them to know better.” 

Whether your organization has been hosting internships for decades or your program is just getting off the ground, at the end of the day, most hiring managers are in agreement that it’s one of the most powerful ways to make great new hires  — not to mention avoid a few bad ones. “I was on the phone with one of my largest clients the other day,” continued Flato, “and he told me that if he could only keep one program in his entire company, it would be the internships.” 

Author Bio
Emily Bennington is the co-author of Effective Immediately: How to Fit In, Stand Out, and Move Up at Your First Real Job (Ten Speed Press, 2010.) She hosts the popular career blog Professional Studio 365 and is a regular contributor to Monster.com and the college section of The Huffington Post. She can be reached via email at [email protected] or on Twitter @EmilyBennington.

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To capitalize on this new class of job seekers, it’s important to create relationships with students early, even before their diplomas are printed. The key to attracting young talent to your organization is to be strategic in your approach to college recruitment. And while appealing to today’s college students requires a social media presence, there’s still a lot to be said for — and gained by — showing up in person.

Below, we’ll discuss best practices for recruiting college students, focusing on what to do before, during, and after conducting on-campus interviews.

The Importance of On-Campus Interviews

Campus interviews are a time-tested method for publicizing your jobs and internships, generating resumes, identifying candidates, and interviewing them in an efficient, low-cost, structured process. Typically, companies form and maintain relationships with the universities they’re targeting (the University of California at Berkeley, for example, provides great resources for connecting students to more than 300 employers).

Even if you’re not currently hiring, on-campus interviews are key to promoting your company’s employer brand and building awareness. Think of it as an ongoing investment that will pay off down the road. You’ll also gain valuable insight into what motivates emerging workforces, allowing you to fine-tune your recruitment strategies.

Recruiting College Students: Before the Interview

Connecting with college students starts with establishing an ongoing and visible presence on campus. Your campus recruiters and managers need to develop personal relationships with the students you’re targeting to help you understand what motivates them.

What are some effective pre-interview activities? Here are a few ideas to consider:

Cultivate Your Social Media Presence

Even more than millennials, Gen Z is ever-present on social media. From Instagram and YouTube to Snapchat and TikTok, “Zoomers” spend an average of three hours a day on social media. So, your company should also be present and active on as many platforms as you can manage, with a consistent message across the board.

“Don’t expect them to come to you,” says Jes Osrow, director of people and culture for TodayTix. “You’re missing out if you’re not proactively finding those places where they are.”

Target Nearby Colleges

Of course, it’s important to get on campus and form partnerships with college career centers. Most have career management systems to promote job opportunities and can help employers with campus recruiting activities, including directing you to relevant campus clubs that could be good sources of quality candidates.

Some companies take their campus recruiting a step further and go straight to the professors for help. “We ask them to recruit top-performing students for us,” says Matthew Ross, co-owner and COO of MySlumberYard.com, a mattress review site. “You’d be surprised by how receptive professors are to gestures from local companies.”

Designate a Campus Ambassador

If you don’t already have strong connections on campus, find a liaison. Identify a recent intern to serve as a campus ambassador, someone who can be a conduit between your company and the school. Students and recent grads know the ins and outs of their campuses and can be very helpful in creatively spreading the word about opportunities at your organization.

Recruiting College Students: During the Interview

Once you’ve made your way through a stack of resumes, identified potential candidates, and lined up the interviews, be prepared to ask the kind of questions that will sell them on your company. Interviewing and hiring college students effectively requires a clear understanding of what you’re looking for and what motivates this next generation of workers.

Be Mindful of Company Culture

Gen Z cares about how a company or corporation affects the world around it. “Socially responsible programs are very important to them,” says Paul McDonald, senior executive director at Robert Half. To the extent that your company is involved in projects and initiatives that help a program, cause, or community, promote it as much as you can.

It’s also important to know exactly what you’re offering in terms of culture, because new graduates have some clear priorities. “It’s the empowerment generation, which is great, but it makes it way more difficult for employers — especially old-school employers — to wrangle the necessary things to entice the top talent in that age group,” says Osrow.

This generation is looking for upward mobility, companies that invest in them, and work-life balance. “What I’m hearing more and more is, ‘We don’t mind working hard, we’ll work at 8:00 at night if we have to, but we want to leave at 5 each day to go to the gym or to get home and take care of our family,’” McDonald says. “That’s highly encouraged, especially with technology today. A lot of work can be done in an hour or two at night if required. We stress that, and that’s a real attractant.”

Get Them Talking

New graduates generally have little to no experience interviewing, so they’re probably nervous. You’ll want to approach the interview with more flexibility. “Set them at ease,” McDonald says. “Spend a little more time on lighter conversation than you would with an experienced person that you’re recruiting. Ask them about some of the off-campus activities that might be on their resume.”

In addition to putting them more at ease, this gives you the opportunity to evaluate their soft skills — how they communicate and listen, and whether they’re able to think critically and problem solve. “You’re going to find that you’re evaluating on the potential of that person because they don’t have a lot of experience,” says McDonald.

Recruiting College Students: After the Interview

Hopefully, finishing a set of interviews leaves you with some great prospects. Whether you’ve found “the one” or you’ve narrowed down the list to a few top contenders, you have options for your next hire — including starting your new employee on a temporary basis. Of course, no matter what route you go for this round, a college recruiter’s work at building relationships and promoting the company is never done.

Consider a Temporary Start

When it comes to hiring college graduates, it’s hard to know how they’re really going to perform on the job. “Many companies are starting to test drive their applicants before they give them full-time offers,” says Jill Tipograph, co-founder of Early Stage Careers, a career coaching service for young people. “We’ve seen this with Ivy League students. They’ll start them as an apprentice or on a three- to six-month project base with a stipend or paying hourly.”

This arrangement can be useful to both parties: Employers can see how an employee performs in real time, and employees can get a real sense of a company’s culture and whether it’s a workplace they enjoy and in which they feel they can thrive.

Contract work can also be attractive to graduates who hope to move on to master’s level education. “Those who plan to attend graduate school or medical school may want to benefit from gaining relevant experience while preparing for admissions,” says Christine Casey-Charter, vice president of business development for HumanEdge. “A year of contract employment in a related field is a tremendous career boost.”

Plan Site Visits

Once you’ve conducted a round of interviews — and even beforehand — it can be helpful to bring candidates and school representatives to your home turf. Think about inviting groups of students, career services representatives, and faculty from key departments to your facility. Site visits are great ways to share your company culture, organization, products, and services with participants and they can help spread the word about your company when they return to campus.

Give In-Class Presentations

Regardless of where you are in the hiring process, there’s always more you can do to recruit quality candidates on college campuses. For example, in the key departments at your focus schools, see if you can find a professor who will invite you into their class. Or, maybe you can find a lecture series in which you can present. The point here is not to actively recruit but to raise awareness of your company and generate interest in your profession.

Get Expert Advice on Recruiting College Students With Monster

Tapping your business into the college network should be part of a broader recruiting strategy focusing on multiple talent acquisition channels. The best way to consistently staff your business with the best employees is to learn from the top experts in the field. Here at Monster, you can get free information on the latest recruiting tips and management strategies your business needs.

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