The recruitment landscape in Aotearoa has changed in the past 12 months, and we have seen a surge in demand for graduates. This is fantastic news for Summer of Tech - we can help connect graduates and employers RIGHT NOW through our SoTJobs programme. Right now we have over 500 candidates actively seeking full-time entry level roles in the NZ tech industry! Here's more tips to help you get amongst it!We predict more competition than usual for employers wanting to hire final year/graduating students for summer internships in 2021. Many of these candidates will be snapped up before the end of the year into grad roles, commencing any time from November 2021 to February 2022.  This is fantastic news for graduates... and also for employers genuinely willing to hire students on potential and invest in their education through a mentored internship. Summer of Tech can help you find students early on their journey, but you'll need to plan for support and training over the summer.We are making some small changes to our programmes for 2021, to be clear that we can definitely help you hire graduates.  But this is separate process to hiring a summer intern:

Updated guidelines for our 2021 programmes

Our Summer Internship programme is structured around recruitment events and activities leading to an 'Offers Day', when internship offers are released to candidates. This is not changing.Our SoTJobs programme is an on-demand recruitment portal for anything that is NOT a summer internship, including full-time graduate roles, part-time student jobs, and contracts throughout the year. We are tightening our rules this year, to be clearer about the difference between grad & intern recruitment. SoTJobs is not a loophole to avoid the deadline for summer internship offers!

Roles that will be classified as Summer Internships are:

• Full-time
• For around 3 months/400 hours
• Starting between Offers Day and 31 January
• Will go through our recruitment events & offers day process.

All other roles may be offered any time of year through SoTJobs, including

• Graduate roles (that are full time for more than 12 months)
• Part-time roles (less than 40 hours per week)
• Contract roles (less than 12 months duration, outside of the "summer" timeframe).

We have added a "start date" range to job listings, so you can be clear when you want candidates to start. Summer internships can start any time after offers are accepted, but usually start mid-November, depending on exam timetables.

Here are some tips to help you secure the best entry-level talent in 2021

Tip #1: if you want to hire a final year student for a summer internship that continues into ongoing full-time work … you could offer them a graduate role NOW.

Their contract needs to be full-time, and more than 12 months. The market is hot, and we can help! Register for our SoTJobs programme to check out the talent.

Tip #2: if you definitely want to hire an intern, this is the year to hire on potential.

You may not find many final-year candidates, so please get ready to spot talent early on in their learning journey! We can help! We have students from 50+ NZ tertiary institutions, from all year levels. Many of them are coming to our bootcamps to brush up their technical and core skills, and many will attend our Meet & Greet events in September. You can check out their profiles on our web platform.

Tip #3: Consider how much you are willing to pay your interns and graduates.

We suggest you do some research on wages. We can help! Here's a post on our data so far this year.

Tip #4: It's not all about the money, but...

If the wages are significantly different to what other employers are offering, you might miss out on your preferred candidate(s). You can definitely offer mentoring, training, support, flexibility, all the other benefits that you're offering your existing employees to retain them! Interns and graduates are no different. Here's a post about the top 3 reasons we see for students and graduates to say YES to a job offer.