SoT2021 Offers (an Employers Guide)
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!
This year, more than any year in our history, we can say that securing the "top talent" is competitive. As you know from the world outside Summer of Tech, top digital professionals are in high demand - especially with borders closed. This 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! You don’t have to restrict yourself to students who have applied for your role(s). We have a powerful search tool AND an anonymised search function designed to help you do exactly this! Give it a whirl to reduce bias and unearth previously unexplored candidates. Remember, diverse teams are the best teams (more on this topic over here) and you’re hiring interns on POTENTIAL, not experience!
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 newbies 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 the capacity to mentor and support, then you can DEFINITELY get payback on your investment in interns 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.
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. 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 are below! These are super-SoT-employer-skills that will come in handy during SoT Recruitment Season:
Managing shortlists
We recommend you put your final candidates on a visible shortlist, 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 the 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, we ask you to send some feedback about why you're not taking it any further with them. The volume of applications will mean you're probably not able to give feedback to everyone. 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. This way they can come back stronger next year and in their next job application or job interview in the real world.
Cloning Roles
Can't decide between multiple awesome candidates? No problem, you can increase the number of positions 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. You can load a new role and load an offer for it, too - remember a student doesn’t have to apply to receive an offer!
Get Ready for Offers
Here's a screenshot of your Prospects Page...
Manage your prospects for each role on the prospects page
Drag your final candidates to the far right column to load offers
From 27 September, you can load offers onto our website (these will be published (sent) to your top candidate(s) on the 6th 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 27 September)
Load offers on our website (between 27th Sept - 5th October) ready for publishing at 10am on the 6th of October.
Here's a screenshot of your Offers Page, which will open up on 27th Sept:
Offers must include:
An hourly rate (or pro-rata salary)
The name of the mentor/manager
A short message
...and be followed up by a formal employment contract & offer letter within 1 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.