Here's some tips to make sure you're ready for offers day, when employers send offers out to their top candidates for paid summer internships!Securing the "top talent" is competitive, as you know from the world outside Summer of Tech, top digital professionals are in high demand, and that is equally true for students and graduates in our programme.Top candidates in past years had 10+ offers each! Until we figure out how to clone awesome students, they can only accept one offer... which means we're in for a few polite and regretful "thanks but no thanks" responses to internship offers this year, too.Here are some tips for employers, to help increase the chances of a resounding YES PLEASE from your top candidates for internship roles:

Tip 1: Search far and wide!

Our top tip for employers is to cast the net wide!  We have an anonymised search function which was designed to help you do exactly this! Give it a whirl to eliminate unconscious bias and unearth previously unexplored candidates. Remember, if you're looking to hire good people, they might not look, sound or appear how you're expecting... and diverse teams are the best teams (much longer blog post on this topic, here)!Don't disregard non-final-year students: outstanding people will be outstanding in earlier years of study. While they may not have been exposed to All The Things yet, motivated undergraduate will learn fast, and with the right support from your mentors, they WILL deliver amazing and valuable work for you during their internship. If you've got capacity to mentor and support, then you can DEFINITELY get pay-back on your investment in an undergraduate before the end of summer.

Tip 2: Be an Intern-magnet

Just re-capping the advice we gave in this blog post: there's a bunch of things you can do to help students understand why your organisation is THE BESTEST.  Anything you can do to help students understand the nature of your business, the opportunity you're offering for them to apply, learn & grow their skills, the kick-start & support you're providing to their career... all these things are GOLD right now.For an insight into how we'll be advising students to make their assessment and decisions around accepting offers, check out this blog post.

Tip 3: Communicate!

Our Recruitment Season has some rules. This includes the very important rule about offers happening on, and not before Offers Day. You must not put pressure on students to decide on roles before then. But you can (and you are encouraged to) let your top candidates know that you're keen, that an offer will be coming, that you'd be stoked if they accepted, etc!Communication is super-important. Even more tips for employers during recruitment season from John Clegg, here.Unpressured communication, that is, in line with our Terms & Conditions that you've all agreed to ;-)

How-To Guides

Extra bonus tips for Shortlists & Cloning Roles below! These are super-SoT-employer-skills that will come in handy during SoT Recruitment Season:

Managing shortlists

Students can see if they're on a shortlist, so this is a great way to let them know you're interested, that you'll probably be contacting them for an interview, etc!  Being shortlisted is super-exciting for students, and it will trigger all sorts of research, hopes & dreams as they start researching and getting ready to hear from you about next steps!As we get closer to Offers Day, we expect shortlists to get shorter.  If you've interviewed a candidate but decide not to proceed with them, it would be extremely wonderful if you can send a quick email with some feedback about why you're not taking it any further with them.SoT is not a formal application process, you're not expected to respond to every Expression of Interest or follow up with everyone you met at Meet & Greet.  But for students who have put time, energy & effort into preparing for an interview, or responding to a technical test that you've set, they would hugely appreciate some follow up and feedback, so they can come back stronger next year, and in their next job application or job interview out there in the real world.

Cloning Roles

Can't decide between multiple awesome candidates? No problem, you can increase the number of roles you have available at any time, and pre-load your offers to all your awesome candidates!All you need to do is "edit the job" and increase the number of roles you have available. 

Get Ready for Offers

Here's a screen shot of your Prospects Page...

1. Manage your prospects for each role on the prospects page
2. Drag your final candidates to the far right column to load offers
3. From 28 September, you can load offers onto our website (these will be published (sent) to your top candidate(s) on the 3rd of October

NOTE: some of your prospects categories will be "visible" to students. This means they will see that they are being considered for a role. They cannot see their ranking or the category that they're in.  You can customise your categories on the Categories page.

Load Offers (from 28 September)

Load offers on our website (between 28th Sept - 2nd October) ready for publishing at 10am on the 3rd of October.

Here's a screenshot of your Offers Page, which will open up on 28 Sept:

Offers must include:

• ...an hourly rate (or pro rata salary)
• ...the name of the mentor/manager
• ...a short cover letter

...and be followed up by a formal employment contract & offer letter within 2 weeks of acceptance.  If you want some tips on employment contracts, let us know!...students have 6 (business) hours to respond to offers (!!) We expect 95% of offers to be filled on Offers Day...if your top preference declines your offer, your backup offer will be released immediately...if your top preference accepts your offer, your backup offers will never know how close they were

Happy offering, everyone! Search well, communicate clearly, schmooze your best candidates, play fair, and all will go well on the 3rd of October.