The following is by Samantha Stauf.
Just about every great business had modest origins.
The late JR Simplot may not have been able to start his lucrative plans had a coin toss not gone his way. The founders of Whole Foods secretly lived in their first store because they couldn’t afford another home. Under Armour wasn’t always a premiere clothing line: the founder Kevin Plank spent years running the business out of his car and his grandmother’s basement.
No business can grow without a mixture of loyalty, luck, and acumen. Of those three, acumen is the thing that an entrepreneur can most readily control. Either that entrepreneur is a smart businessperson or he/she isn’t.
A growing business means a growing need for employees. The first employees you hire can be the make-or-break motions of your growing business, and it is one of the most nerveracking processes of any entrepreneur’s life. These are the people that are going to define your brand and what it represents.
As a country, we’ve been able to put a bandaid on the jobs wound that was created back in 2008: the situation isn’t as dire as it once was. Having said that, there are still plenty of unemployed and underemployed people looking for jobs, and many of these people are college educated.
As of graduation season in 2014, 8.5% of college graduates are unemployed. This is a really scary age to be unemployed, especially if you just graduated with a Bachelors. Forget the whole “embarking on a new adventure in life” thing, the second someone graduates in 2014, that person is asked to start paying off an average of $29,400 in student loan debt. Facing the prospect of paying off that humongous debt all the while striking out on Craigslist responses is hardly an enviable position.
It might strike a wee bit of fear in the heart of a fledgling business to take a chance on employees who were playing binge drinking games until only a few months ago, but an influx of recent college graduates could be the recipe for taking the company to the next level. Here are a few reasons why.
Creating a Base of Future Leaders/Managers
You may *want *to steal middle managers away from other successful companies, but the chances are you won’t have the resources to do it. This might be a blessing in disguise. Even though the managers you have in mind may be skilled and highly qualified, you would be throwing them into leadership roles in a company where they don’t know the nuances and mechanisms.
Instead, a slew of recent college graduates will get to know the company. If it’s a successful startup, they will be the ones who helped to drive it. It seems logical to me that these people would be immensely qualified to help your company keep growing.
Grunt Work
Every college graduate takes several classes on subjects that he or she is completely uninterested in. They do this to fulfill requirements for graduation. How does this translate well for a startup? There’s a lot of grunt work that nobody wants to do in any business, startup or established. A eager to please, recent college graduate will ordinarily embrace this work, since that employee is used to doing work he/she didn’t necessarily want to do.
Innovation
A recent college graduate just left an environment where new ideas are typically encouraged; where they are frequently challenged to find their voice on an issue. Even apart from that, most research indicates that we as people tend reach our innovative peak in our 20s.
Sure, it’s scary to rock the boat with new concepts when operating a startup that is barely getting by, but this is the precise moment when you should be trying new things. Stagnant thinking is a recipe for stagnant growth.
Lower Salary
The debt a recent college graduate is facing may be overwhelming, but it doesn’t compare with the cost of raising a family. Older and more experienced workers will ask for higher starting pay than a recent college graduate. When you’re operating a startup, it’s imperative to find as many appropriate cost-cutting measures as possible.
Teamwork
Truth be told, personally I was rarely a fan of group projects during my days as an undergraduate. I was typically burdened with the task of leading the group/doing all of the work. In hindsight, I’m glad I was so frequently forced into these tasks, because corporate culture sure loves a team project.
Recent college graduates will embrace the notion of teamwork. They are used to having to work in teams, and they will be eager to learn from others about their new business.
Travel
At the age of 27, about 34% of college graduates are married. That leaves 66% of recent graduates who are not in the process of starting a family. This typically indicates more flexibility. A younger employee with no family is more likely to agree to frequent travels across the country. That employee is not going to object because of limited time with family. In fact, that employee might be thrilled at the prospect of seeing new places and networking with people within the industry.
These are just a few of the reasons why hiring recent college graduates is a generally smart idea. There are a myriad of other reasons – for instance, you may want to consider hiring talented graduates to prevent your competitors from grabbing hold of them first. But hopefully the ones I’ve listed will point you in the right direction.