Graduate recruitment and internships in the recession – time to switch focus to start-ups
June 1st, 2009 by chris spavinWe are glad to feature Rajeeb Dey, founder of enternships.com, as a guest blogger at Make Your Mark today:
“The story is a familiar one…on the one hand, large corporates are scaling back recruitment drives leaving graduates and university students with few ‘traditional’ routes to find experience. On the other, start-ups and small/medium businesses (SMEs) need highly skilled, motivated and creative people to roll their sleeves up and get involved in working with them in growing their businesses. These small firms struggle to find efficient ways to reach out to these candidates as they do not have the time or budgets to go out on campuses to do the traditional ‘milkround’.
Many students are finding themselves with nothing to do for the Summer 2009 and the prospects are not looking great for those entering the job market after graduating this year. It is therefore more important that ever that we foster enterprising skills amongst young people to cope in times of recession. In my opinion, the best way to nurture these skills (other than setting up your own ventures) is to work in a start-up or entrepreneurial environment.
Start-ups and small firms have a great opportunity to take some of the brightest students on short-term work placements or as first time employees – we want to help these companies raise their visibility on campus and amongst the graduate market.
By undertaking work placements in start-ups/small businesses (or what I call “enternships”) we can encourage the new generation of students and graduates to follow an entrepreneurial career path rather than relying on the more traditional graduate recruitment options offered in the past. Hopefully in years to come, an ‘enternship’ in a start-up or small firm will have the same “kudos” as internships within large corporations!”
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