Recruitment Guides

One of the key issues undergraduate level students face when undergoing job recruitment is identifying all the jobs which are appropriate for their interests and skills. Within Handshake, the platform used by Cornell career services to post job openings, there are tens of thousands of different jobs with varying timelines, requirements, and so forth. This broad range of post-graduate possibilities is rewarding as it offers vast opportunities but also makes it challenging for students to understand the specifics of job applications.

Additionally, students are often unprepared for job recruitment, unaware of relevant job roles, and miss recruitment windows. Our research within the Cornell engineering community shows that 79% disagree that Cornell career services prepared them well for job recruitment, 72% disagree that they were aware of most jobs in their field and how to recruit for them, and 81% agree that they have missed recruitment windows. Althought the internet and carreer services provide a vast amount of information and resources for job seekers, these survey responses make it clear that this information is not getting to students on time. One possible cause of this issue is that there is too much information and students lack a resource which effectively summarizes and introduces job recruitment.

To target the issue regarding job recruitment preparedness we developed a series of guides to help college students in their recruitment efforts. The guides are presented on a google slide format so that they can be shared virtually and updated as job roles change, or new jobs emerge. The content of the guides covers basic information on networking and job-specific information. The job-specific guides outline the top three job industries, where a combined 59% of graduates work, based on the 2018 Cornell post-graduate engineering report. These three job sectors are Technology, Consulting/Professional, and Financial Services. Furthermore, the target audience for this resource are undergraduate juniors and seniors seeking summer internships and full-time roles respectively. Our guides are particularly useful for this audience as most of our research and takeaways are based on this group. Overall, the goal of the guides is to provide a resource to understand a broad range of job roles in a succinct format, which offers links to further explore topics if the user is interested.

The intention of these guides is to serve as a starting point in the recruitment efforts of an undergraduate junior or senior. These guides are condensed and present the most essential information so that students can easily identify job roles they are interested in and be directed to resources on how to progress their application. The following topics are covered: networking, descriptions of roles, recruitment timelines, interview preparation resources, prominent employers, starting salaries, and exit opportunities. An important consideration is that these guides group roles into categories and specific jobs at individual firms will have slightly adjusted roles with different responsibilities, interview styles, and application timelines. Therefore, it is important that these guides are used early on in a student’s recruitment process to identify relevant roles and seek further resources.