This past week more than 400 ERE.net community members tuned in for a webinar on college recruiting with a shoestring budget.

Despite sour economic conditions, many organizations are continuing to hire, albeit maybe not with the gusto or resources they used to muster. Those organizations that continue to augment organizational capability and capacity with new college grads are doing a very smart thing, as several organizations that stopped college hiring following the economic collapse in 2001 can attest.

Entry-level hires from colleges and universities play a vital yet often undervalued role in many organizations. Cutting college intake even for a short time can have disastrous unplanned impacts.

Recent college graduates bring with them new skills, the ability to question tired thinking by asking “why,” and remain malleable enough for organizations to mold into entry-level management and core-contributor roles vital to the organization’s succession chain.

Organizations can cut costs, but they can’t stop time, so choking off college recruiting can lead to:

1. Acceleration of aging workforce issues. If you have an aging workforce now and you choke off hiring of younger talent, statistically speaking, the average age of employees in your organizations is going to grow at a significantly faster pace. While that may not seem like an issue in the short term, letting your workforce gray significantly may impact your ability to recruit college grads when your organization does restore its interest in college recruiting.
2. An empty succession pool. Many organizations cut college recruiting budgets entirely following 9/11. Due to a slow economic recovery following that tragedy, college recruiting budgets didn’t recover quickly. The result today is a number of organizations that have no choice but to spend millions poaching talent with 5-7 years’ experience from other organizations or hiring talent with 2-3 years’ experience and investing in rapid development programs. For organizations in that boat, they are realizing that it would have been more economical in the long run to have maintained investments in college recruiting.
3. Slowed innovation. Possibly the best thing about hiring recent college graduates is the fact that they don’t know anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. The truth is that they don’t know anything about why you do things the way you do, so they are more apt to ask why. When such discussions erupt, that’s often when new hires can introduce new thinking, new technology, and new approaches. Choking off the supply of individuals not subject to historical group think can stifle an organization’s ability to evolve and be innovative.

What follows below the webinar insert are the questions raised by those attending and our answers.