70 000 students per click. How modern recruitment works: Dalibor Herbrich (#197)
- Martin Hurych
- 17. 6.
- Minut čtení: 28
Finding young people for manufacturing, engineering or technology today? That's like looking for a needle in a haystack for a lot of companies. And when they find them, they run away after a while. Or they don't come back at all. And so most of us give up.
But it's working. It's even possible in the regions, without friends at schools, without an army of HR specialists and without thousands for trade fair stands.
Dalibor Herbrich, founder and CEO of QuickJOBS, shows a different approach. Over the past 9 years, he has connected more than 70,000 students at 4,000 schools with hundreds of companies. He saves companies time, nerves and money.
It gives students their first chance. And it's all almost on a click. In this episode, I wanted to get everything he knows about modern student recruitment out of Dalibor:
If you follow the recommendations, I'm sure the next student will come from QuickJOBS - and stay with your company.
"The basis of successful recruitment is a clear advertisement. Especially for GenZ."
Dalibor Herbrich | CEO @ QuickJOBS s.r.o.
70 000 students per click. How modern recruitment works
(transcript)
Martin Hurych
In the preparation, you're a lover of exercise and sauna, I was interested in the sauna, I always have a lot of things on my mind in the sauna. What's the last thing you came up with that was clever in the sauna that took you a big step forward, that sparked you in the sauna?
Dalibor Herbrich
I usually go to the sauna with a friend, always after a workout, but it's been a few days since my back was hurting, so I went to the sauna alone. I was thinking a lot at the time about how to grow tenfold. We managed to grow three times last year and I wondered what could be the thing that could make it that much bigger. So I've been thinking about those ways, but it's always great to be alone with my head for maybe an hour, even if I'm not in the sauna for an hour, of course.
What and who is QuickJOBS?
Martin Hurych
Sometimes it's dangerous to be alone with yourself for an hour and think. QuickJOBS, what is it, what do you do and how did you get into the business?
Dalibor Herbrich
I founded QuickJOBS some 9 years ago. My best friend at the time was struggling with finances, which was towards the end of college, he was at CTU in architecture, he loved it, raved about it, and one day he told me he was thinking about dropping out of school. I thought it was terribly strange and when we talked about it more after a few beers, he told me it was for financial reasons. His mom was a maid in Marienbad, where we both came from, she could barely support herself, let alone her son in Prague.
I was a bit upset because I thought to myself that he was not in Africa to decide between education and money and I wanted to find him a job. But I found that it was really hard to find a job as a student and there was no job portal that was purely for students and graduates. Then I found out that there were more students struggling with finances like this and that the biggest problem was for commuter families. For those families, when that student goes to that college, then they're picking up that big city expense, plus they don't have friends in that particular city. So at that point I thought we could try something like that, there was a hype around apps at the time, so we went ahead with the app and it's been some 9 years since then.
Martin Hurych
Where have you come since then? Today, QuickJOBS is, for me, a very well proven company. For those who are hearing about QuickJOBS for the first time, what exactly do you do?
Dalibor Herbrich
After 9 years, we are now at a stage where we have some 70,000 students on the platform and we have connections to more than 4,000 schools across the country. In some schools, we are even the official job portal of the school and because of this, companies are using us to recruit students. We have different apps where when they send an advert it comes straight to their phone, kind of like Uber for finding people. I tell the young people again that it's Tinder for finding jobs, so they can really click to find the job. That way it works for temp jobs.
The moment those companies want people for internships and long-term positions, they're using the database again, when they go there and it's really tailored to the fact that you're looking for those students. The big problem with companies has always been that they went to, say, a school job fair and now they're just waiting there, hunting to see who's going to come and if they're the right faculty and the right class. But with us, they can come in, they can pick people right away based on their specific education and they have a phone number, an email, and they're also people who have voluntarily registered to have companies call them.
And then beyond that, we have connections directly into the school systems. The moment a manufacturing company comes in, for example, there's no in Prague and needs people in the neighborhood to know about it and for those students to come to them, so we can get right into the school systems and make that offer to the students of all the schools in the neighborhood. For them, it's a matter of making an appointment in a couple of hours rather than having to go to dozens of schools. We're addressing it for the huge players in the country as well, we were just talking to O2 about it a little while ago.
Why can't we recruit a student into the company?
Martin Hurych
This is unbelievably good for the fact that, punishingly at least in my bubble, knowledge of QuickJOBS is woefully low, which is why I'm glad you're here. My audience is primarily male somewhere between the ages of 55 and 65. The core is guys from 35 to 55 and I think people who have absolutely no idea how to properly recruit a student today. What are we doing wrong, where are the red flags for you, how are we recruiting people today, and why are we not getting it right?
Dalibor Herbrich
One of the biggest problems is that the show is stuck in what it was before, and that is that we are going after graduates. But realistically, even the statistics show that 92% of college graduates are working at that school. Big companies have already realized that and they're getting in touch with those students during that school, freshman year, sophomore year, through internships, through writing bachelor's theses, through theses, through part-time jobs, and then those people stick around. There's no such thing anymore where that student graduates and just starts looking for a job. That doesn't really happen anymore and those companies, especially the big ones, once they catch them during that school, they don't let them go.
When I started, it was exactly graduates, now it's students, but we're going to the high school level, some companies are even doing employer branding at the elementary school level. But it's not just about employer branding, it's about making sure that people are in the industry in general. For example, we do it a lot in the construction industry, the big problem is that young people still imagine that they will be in the construction industry somewhere with a shovel. They want to do something with technology, but for example the construction industry is pretty much about technology, a lot of designers are sitting in offices and not out there with shovels. So these companies are trying to educate these kids, they're trying to take them to these construction sites to look at it and get them interested in the industry in general. The mistake is waiting for the finished Superman who's already graduated and is going to give 100%. That's not really realistic right now.
How to use QuickJOBS for employer branding in your region?
Martin Hurych
You said you cover 70,000 students and some 4,000 schools. That means you're very likely covering most of the fields that the school system produces. What should I do as someone who has a small, medium-sized business somewhere in the region? Because it's been my experience that when you say employer branding, a lot of these people say that's for O2, that's for Spore, that's for big companies. How could I use your service to get into that student community in my region?
Dalibor Herbrich
There's definitely more than one way to do it, depending on how much time and budget you have. I say that purely for the reason that if I'm recruiting 2, 3 young people a year, then at that point I probably don't need to do something huge by going to school every month. But the moment you really want to recruit those young people in large numbers, then it makes sense to let those students know about you, to move among them. I think it's similar to sales, how they generally say you have to have some 5-7 touchpoints before that client makes that purchase decision. It's the same for the person looking for a job. Unless you have some totally super great offer, one advert isn't enough. That person has to see you five, seven times, and it could be anything really. Some companies do it through social media, they do different threads to let them know the company is there, then the offer comes to them one day and they think they know the company and that's when they go for it.
If they're looking for the quantity to be bigger, I would certainly be happy to do those collaborations with those schools just for that employer branding. You need to be there at that particular moment of that recruitment when that person is making that decision, and oftentimes that's not when you're there. So we do work with those clients to get them to advertise on a regular basis, even if it's at a time when we know those people aren't going to go. It's about getting those people to know about them again and it's a matter of putting out an advert, which is a few clicks away. At the same time, we're right in those school systems, so it's good to catch those students maybe on those internships, give them the opportunity to go on that internship at all.
In our country we have a list of companies that are open to students, graduates, which students also struggle with a lot. For example, they try to find a job, they go to the traditional portals and when they contact those companies, they don't hear back at all or they are told that they are not interested in students, which, at that point, discourages them from speaking to anyone at all. You have to be in the places where they specifically are and they're moving, which are the school systems, for college students it's the student portals, it's the cafeterias, it's the dorms. For example, we've found that works much better than school bulletin boards. I didn't even know that there was a bulletin board on campus when I was in college, but in the canteens and the dorms, I kept seeing all kinds of ads. So there are more of those avenues, but I would spread awareness of the company in general to be more visible as a brand and if you want to be more in relationship with those students and need to convince them, then feel free to go to those schools.
How to write an advertisement for Gen Z?
Martin Hurych
I'm honestly surprised that Generation Z still reads message boards. Another thing I feel we're doing wrong is writing ads. What does Generation Z want to see in an ad today?
Dalibor Herbrich
I'd say it's pretty similar to what they want in the job itself. They realistically take that what's in the job advert will then be in the job and that tends to be the problem when the job advert gets completely oversubscribed and then they come into the job and they don't last there. That's often the problem with big companies, that they try to overcrowd it. I would say there are a couple of main things that young people look for. One is flexibility, because realistically they need some flexibility during that school. When I talk to those companies that still have the old standbys, they often look at it from their point of view and not from the point of view of the student themselves. When he's studying, he also doesn't know what his schedule is going to be next semester, he doesn't know exactly how he's going to do it, so there needs to be flexibility both in time and location so that he can do it anytime, anywhere.
The second thing is the meaning. A lot of times it's talked about, huge things are said, but the idea is more around communicating, for example, the vision of the company, so that they know they are part of something bigger and helping the world around them. It's good to go to the level of individual tasks as well, so if I'm giving a task, it's good to say why that task is important. A lot of times, for example, smaller companies take on students as sales assistants. If you're going to an event, it would be great if you added all the people on LinkedIn to follow you. It's a lot of clicking for a founder, it's over a long period of time, but they know it's important to do it. That's why it's good to have that student who's happy to do it for you for that hour, you give them two hundred, but it's good to tell them why it's important to the company and explain that it helps the company. At that point the energy is completely different and I say that from personal experience as well. I've had people on my team since they were 16 and I couldn't believe what they could do. They used to do client calls for me and I was like, even experienced people have problems with cold calls and here these 16-year-old girls were taking it as such a game. When we told them why it was important to us, they went for it and it was great.
Martin Hurych
That solved one question, whether the blacksmith's mare goes barefoot, obviously not. You said one of the things they want besides sense is flexibility, which is understandable in a student. How do you work with that across professions? Logically if you go to an office, you can remote, you can remote from anywhere, you can remote anytime, that's very likely not the case with a lathe. How does a manufacturing company, for example, go about affording a student?
Dalibor Herbrich
This is perfectly understandable and they deal with this flexibility by giving them flexibility during the exam period. The person wants to use that time off, but they can't tell you exactly when it's going to be. So the flexibility is more about maybe making more arrangements in advance, but it is possible to fit it in with their exam period, for example. Some companies will even combine it with Erasmus for example, by letting them go and then coming back. It's really about thinking about how that person's situation is and adapting it to that. They then don't have the problem of giving them almost full-time outside that exam period, but they need more work in the exam period and they take that time off.
What kind of students can be found in QuickJOBS?
Martin Hurych
Just to give you some idea, we're talking about engineering, technology, manufacturing companies here, how are the positions stratified within the student database that you're managing today, is there any way to say that?
Dalibor Herbrich
The fact that we are connected directly to the school systems of 90% of the schools makes no difference at all. I'll give you an example, we deal with everything from manufacturing companies to hospitals to banks, now pharmaceutical companies, it's really a mix of everything. By being in the school system, we don't really care who you want to go after. You know exactly who you want, you tell us the schools and we get it to the students in those schools, it's simple.
The other way is through the database, where most companies use us for undergraduates, because the problem there is that they want to go after specific schools, specific faculties, specific grades. With us, they have all that data and they have phone numbers and emails right along with it. Big corporations often deal with things like gender balance. Finding a lady from an electrical engineering college is a pretty big problem, and here, putting out an advert with that and expecting to hear from a lady from an electrical engineering college is very difficult. With us, you just go into the database, filter out the women from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, put in Prague, Brno and suddenly the list is right there, the contact is there and it's a win-win for both parties.
How does headhunting a student work?
Martin Hurych
When someone is thinking about taking someone on, the standard thinking is that it's going to take a bunch of time, a bunch of paperwork, I have to put an ad somewhere, it's going to hang out there for a while, and I have absolutely no control over who responds. The other option is LinkedIn and LinkedIn selection. You're saying you have a database of 70,000 people that I can apply my own filters to, requirements and it pops up that I can reach out to. That's headhunting.
Dalibor Herbrich
It's true, and it's great that for the first time even the students are headhunted. It's always been more of a senior position, and now you take a student at CTU and suddenly Škoda itself calls him and says they have a job for him. That makes the conversion much higher. He often doesn't even realize that the job would be a good fit for him or that he applied there and suddenly he has an offer on his desk. Now, for example, we had an assistant secretary of state position, and it's awfully hard to find that position even on those state websites, the positions are oddly named, so you can't even find it properly. We've targeted people who have studied law, we've contacted those people and told them that we have a position for them and it could be a great start to their career.
Can I use QuickJOBS to find temps?
Martin Hurych
This will make both sides sit on their asses, because I can imagine that HR managers or managers must be thrilled about it. I would guess that it cuts down very significantly on waste and time that you have to go through and things like that. How does that work in terms of temp jobs? Because a lot of times the temp jobs are such that I don't know today and I need tomorrow, and it's actually impossible to recruit those people through traditional portals. How do temp jobs work for you?
Dalibor Herbrich
We have a record, by the way, 2 minutes to find a man. It works just like Tinder or Uber for finding people. You put out an ad, it instantly clicks on thousands of people's phones, they see the ad, they click that they're interested, and right away those people pop up and you have contact information and you can get in touch with them right away. We use this a lot when we need that assistant, in the promoter business, in the moving business. Logically, the students then leave, they're not going to do it forever, so there is always a huge turnover and often the reliability is lower. For example, the way we deal with that in our country is that everyone has a rating, just like Uber. Those people are getting ratings and reviews from those employers, so they know they should try harder. We tell them in advance to maybe apologize if they can't make it, because that's also a problem with the young ones. By the fact that they know they're being evaluated, the success rate is much higher. Yesterday we were just talking to a company that is looking for people to move through us and they said that we are the fastest and 90% of the people always get an appointment.
The advantage is that the student doesn't even have to look for it. I'm a production guy professionally, so I've been researching the customer journey and for that young person to apply for an offer, they have to realize that they want a job at all. Then he goes to some job portal, in the flood of all these offers he finds your offer, that's where companies with employer branding win, companies that have been seen somewhere before win, as a smaller company you almost don't stand a chance. But if it happens to pick your offer, it still needs a CV, or an e-mail, because that's what the portal requires. The only thing the student wants to tell us is that he's interested. I understand that for senior positions HR needs a lot of things in the CV from the person, but for the student we always heard two things, that they have to be teachable and reliable, that's all. He doesn't need a CV at that point, he doesn't need an email at that point, he doesn't need all those steps at that point and by the fact that it's clicking, he'll think it's interesting and apply. That's how you have that person on the click, so we've made it much more fast in that.
Martin Hurych
Does that mean that if I install your app, I have 70,000 other students' cell phones in my pocket?
Dalibor Herbrich
You could say that it is. You get the contacts of those who are interested, of course, not all of them. For employers, we have a web version of the app, so mobile is Android only, because we've found that those employers who are in the field are more likely to be on Android.
How to motivate students to stay in the company for the long term?
Martin Hurych
So I got selected, I made the call, the candidates came, we high-fived, we signed what we had to sign, and the people in question are on. A lot of people in my bubble are afraid to educate people because there's a superstition that precedes young people that they'll last a year or two, pick up anchors and go somewhere else. So a lot of people don't want to invest in a student when they know that student won't last. I understand it's not exactly your core business, but you're talking to a bunch of managers and business owners. What are the best practices to motivate that student to stay as long as possible?
Dalibor Herbrich
I talk to hundreds of HR people and students a year, so we have a lot of exposure. The key here is to really imagine the life of that student. Generation Z grew up on social media and you see that success everywhere, we're on LinkedIn ourselves, it's almost all success being shared there and they want to experience it too. They see the young people who have experienced it there as well and they're looking for those avenues that are there. They want to experience that success and they want to grow. A lot of times employers come up with totally great offers and it's not really necessary.
Young people don't have the concept of a dream job, they have the job and the dream completely separated. The job is the means to get to that dream and to keep that person, that person needs to grow, they want to grow and they want to get to that success.
So the important thing that is there and the big companies have realized that they are giving them different ways to grow in that company. I think a small company can do that. The biggest problem is that when they feel that they are stunted and they have nothing to learn, that's when they leave, and that applies to both small and large firms. We've had those 16-year-olds on the team and they've been with us for 4, 5 years because they've tried different things in that company so they've felt the growth and that's when those people stay.
Another thing is feedback. Young people require a lot more feedback than they did before. It's not that they just go to work, do their work and quit, they want to know more of the why and when that feedback is there, they know what they should do differently and they grow again. Of course we're not talking about 100% of people, but that growth is usually one of the main reasons they leave, if the company doesn't provide that, they go elsewhere to grow again.
How to connect the mission and vision of the company with the goals of Gen Z?
Martin Hurych
At first glance it may sound terribly transactional, because you say the dream is somewhere else, the goal is somewhere else, the work is just a means to achieve it. It can be taken as a very transactional business, whereas they say that in business what brings those people together and makes the company successful is some kind of vision and mission. So how do you see the best employers connecting their vision, their mission and their values to what that student or graduate expects in terms of their personal goals and their personal success?
Dalibor Herbrich
I would also put it on the record here that we are not talking about the instrument being purely financial. His dream doesn't have to be about having an awful lot of money, his dream might be that he wants to travel, so if the job allows him to travel while he's doing that, that's fine. His dream may be that he wants to get a lot of education, that he wants to get into maybe cool schools, and if the company provides that, again, that's a solution. So here again, it's important to understand the motivation of that individual person and it's not completely one size fits all, that's why you need that feedback, that's why you need those 1:1s. It's important here for those managers to perceive what the goals of that person are and make it more tailored to those individual people and not completely for everybody. In the Czech Republic it is very low unemployment, those people can choose and if they come somewhere where they don't get those conditions and they know they can get somewhere else perfectly fine, why would they stay there. That's something to be reckoned with.
What positives will the student bring to the company?
Martin Hurych
I admit that I don't know personally how it is now, there was a time when companies didn't want students because a student is objectively more work, more dedication, more training. Let's flip it around, what positive things can a student bring to a company that are not in that company at the moment and why should I consider students or graduates then?
Dalibor Herbrich
There are two main topics we usually address with clients. One problem is the transfer of know-how, because often the know-how is retired. There are two things, one is that it takes a long time to build that know-how and the other is to build business relationships. So they are now often trying to recruit the young ones to pair them up with the more experienced colleagues, in the meantime they have been able to take over the know-how, take over those business contacts and build those relationships. The moment that person retires, the company continues to operate. There can be a big problem for those companies when they lose just the business relationships and they lose the know-how of the company, they lose quite a big part of the company.
The second thing here is the innovation and growth of the company itself. The energy and the dynamism in these young people is much more and they are much more willing to try things. They haven't really experienced anything properly, so whatever you give them, they're trying to find their way and the great thing about this generation is that they're used to finding things from a young age. Going back to the ads, you don't have to put everything in the ad. HR used to put all the company information in there, but they can look it all up. The advert is a teaser, the attention span gets shorter and shorter and they can do the rest.
Are the students "not pulling"?
Martin Hurych
There is no reason at all to doubt what you say about predation and innovation. So where does that big mental moat come from, where a lot of owners will tell you, I've tried a couple of young ones and they're a drag?
Dalibor Herbrich
I think maybe there was a different approach to them, that they went with the old approach. We have a lot of companies where HR comes in and says they would like to change it, but management doesn't listen. They're really trying to make a difference and really help that company, but if management doesn't see it, they still have that old view that they're just going to pay them and tell them what to do, that's the problem. They've been wanting a little something more and if they don't have it there, it's not working. At the same time, you can feel it when that management's view of young people is like you say. We also had a conversation with a lady and she said that they managed to find these young people but they couldn't keep them because the colleagues had completely ground them down. They came into a place where they were not welcome at all and they were already taken so they were going to leave anyway, so why teach them anything at all.
How to get started withQuickJOBS?
Martin Hurych
If we get someone excited and they want to try their first part-time job next week, for example, or they want to get some smart student through a thesis to validate or think through a problem, what should they be doing at this point to reach those 70,000 people?
Dalibor Herbrich
It depends on what industry you're in and who you're after. If you want an assistant type person and you don't care what they studied, at that point it's best to drop it completely on as many people as possible. That's when we encourage clients to run an advert with us, it rings their phone and a large mass of people get it. But then it's a different case where you're a smaller or medium sized company in the construction industry and you're up against the biggest players here and you can't quite fight with the same weapons.
For example, they offer free accommodation to those students, they offer scholarships, some companies can give such scholarships that they don't even have to join them afterwards, they just want them to finish. You can't compete in that and that's when you have to find those other advantages of your company. You can be a startup, there's that flexibility there to be able to make arrangements, to be able to touch more things and things like that. At that point, again, we encourage them to go through the database, because they're probably not going to respond to the ad when they have a bambillion other offers out there and they don't know about their offer. At that point, it's better to go to the database, find a CTU student, Faculty of Construction, third year, and right there you have their contact and it's up to you how you convince them via e-mail or phone.
The third case is that you are in a smaller town and there are big players in the area who have already signed up the schools in various ways and you can't get in. The oldschool way has always been that it was through the principals, those relationships are already there and it's hard to get in. For example, some people have told me that they had a colleague there, they didn't have much communication and they haven't communicated with them since. I think it's a terrible shame because they are penalising those students for not getting those offers. The other people who are new to the company are also penalized because a former colleague did something, and that's the way we deal with it here, by putting those offers into the school systems.
With us, we can target not only specific schools, but also specific grades. In manufacturing we often deal with this, they want apprenticeships, they want industrial schools and they only want the final years to see it, or they want the third years to come to them for an apprenticeship. They target that particular offer exactly and at that point they can catch on with that particular message and then we're completely flexible in letting that person go where they want to go. They can go to their website, they can go to our QuickJOBS offer, have them apply, we leave complete flexibility in that. Some companies already have a pretty fine-tuned onboarding process, so it goes to them. For example, we also allow them to go straight from an advert with us to them on the website, so it's not a major call to action, I'm interested in QuickJOBS, but more info on their website.
When Foodora, for example, is coming through us in huge numbers, they need a completely different process, and we can pair it at that point.
Martin Hurych
Then at the school, what does it look like, do they get it on the app where they can see their grades and stuff like that?
Dalibor Herbrich
You say it exactly right. I, even from a product management standpoint, was looking for where these students need to be and not just put it on social media and maybe somebody will just see it. It's taken us a couple of years and we're the only ones that have been able to get it right into those school systems that students are required to use in schools. They have grades, substitutions, schedules, and they have to go there. The moment that student opens the app, the first thing that pops up is a job offer from that company. The advantage here is that you're getting it completely targeted to a specific person and the other thing is that it's all measurable. When the campaign ends, we show all the numbers, how many times it was viewed, how many unique students saw it, how many clicked through, what the conversions are.
In addition, parents can be targeted, because often the parents still have the rights and they are the ones who send the students on internships during the holidays. Some companies choose the strategy that they want to recruit the parents themselves, so they say, he's an industrial student, so maybe the parents will be close to the industry, and they try to offer it to them. Of course, it's still about the kids, so that's why it took us a few years to work that out as well, and that's where the school system always has that veto power, not the school itself. We agreed to do purely career stuff. When we had an offer for a sommelier position that was for a 19+ year old, we still didn't pass because we didn't want to offer them a job that involved alcohol. Here's the other interesting thing about why we even succeeded, because the school systems themselves are technology companies, and they did their own research on those students to see what else they wanted there. Those students themselves told them that they wanted job offers there and that just played into our hands and that's why we're in those systems.
How will recruitment change in the next 3-5 years?
Martin Hurych
You said you used to be a production guy, and that means you're also looking at where you'll take QuickJOBS in the coming years. As I was getting ready for you today, I was horrified to find out that the Alpha generation is slowly entering the market. How will the job market and recruiting change in the next 2, 3 years?
Dalibor Herbrich
We're doing a lot of work on connecting all the schools together. Even with these generations, it is gradually becoming the case that companies want to recruit according to skills, not just according to a particular school, and students want to have the same opportunities, whether they are from a village or Prague. A huge inspiration for us in America is the Handshake app, which is a company that has a million students, or a million companies, I'm not sure now, but they're the biggest there and they have 90% of all the schools there and they're valued at about $3.5 billion. That's a whole other league and they're a huge inspiration to us of what can be done there. So that goal is going to be just to bring all those schools together.
We also tried to establish these collaborations directly, but then we found out that the schools themselves often throw sticks at the students. Some schools, for example, x years ago, they got funding for IT and different systems, they bought the system, they made it their own, how great it would be for them, but they didn't look at making it good for the client. Because of that, they then said if we want to recruit their students, we have to use their system. The people from those schools themselves then said that the companies didn't want to use it because they didn't want another system, which was a terrible shame because the student lost an opportunity because of it. Some schools, for example, have packages for those companies that they have to start from 70, 80 thousand. I understand some business policy, but suddenly students lose the opportunity to work in startups, because startups don't give you 80,000 per person. That's why we want to combine it for everybody, so that the student can come there afterwards, see the offers and at the same time the companies can list that they are interested in specific schools.
In our country, a company can go there and tell you that they are open for writing bachelor's theses and dissertations, and the student can look there and have the phone number and e-mail of the company. We have dealt with students who wanted to write a bachelor's thesis, they had a great idea for Skoda or Metrostav, but they didn't know who to contact in the company. Then they had to go through some department, it took a long time and the students don't have that much time. Here, we give them a phone number and an e-mail address, so if they want, they can contact them straight away. So we try to remove those barriers between those companies and the students as much as possible to make it as easy as possible.
Martin Hurych
Did I understand correctly that if you want to reach a student through the school system today, you have to have the school's permission?
Dalibor Herbrich
Yes. It depends on the school, some people have those school systems so they have to go through the system, some people don't even allow you to do anything anymore, some people used to allow you to email but now they don't do that either because the students don't want to be spammed. Some will tell you to put it on their bulletin board. At the same time, I still see a big plus in school fairs, where it's great just in terms of employer branding, in terms of meeting those students. It's not easy from a timing standpoint because that fair just comes out into a period where you're not recruiting people or it's expensive for you. I was talking to one company just now and they said they had been to a smaller fair, they paid 40,000, they had 4 of which were students, but not one of them stayed in contact with them. On top of that you have to pay for the booth, you have to pay for the people who are there, you have to pay for all the preparation beforehand, so it often comes out to something like 100,000.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If we were to summarize what has been said here at the end and we were to give some cookbook in 3, 5, 7, 10 main points what a person who wants to try to recruit a student or a graduate to a company in a modern way should do, what would you advise them to do?
Dalibor Herbrich
We can start at the very beginning, which is the actual reaching out to the student through the ads. We have some tips on how to write ads on the web, so you have to be careful with the ads. We've got ChatGPT today, again it's going to help us tremendously in making it good for Gen Z, making it attractive. We've even had companies contact us about an advert and they themselves didn't know what position the advert was for. Alternatively, they had some requirement in there, but it ended up not being mandatory at all. So one of those pieces of advice would definitely be, only put the necessary things in that advert and then feel free to have a section on what's a benefit and you can list the other things there. A lot of times the HR person will imagine the Superman thing, how it would be absolutely perfect, but those Supermen don't exist and it just drives a lot of people away. Then it's important to make it very easy for them to get to you.
It doesn't have to be through our portal, but it often happens that there are 5 links per advert and that's not good.
Once those people are in the company, it's important to work with them and be with them, because often the young person is just learning, they don't know these things. So it's useful if you have a buddy program that you put it with somebody and that person will work with it and be able to ask questions. That helps both parties because the buddy is also developing through that. The other thing is the connection to that growth, really knowing those motivations and helping them align that with that work to achieve that. If the person has the motivation to make half a million and you know that they can do it in that company, tell them you're not going to give it to them now, but there are given ways to get to that amount. At that point, they're working in a completely different way. I know that maybe one of the big prejudices is that young people are lazy. But when these people were delivering things to me at 2am because they needed to finish something and all they had to do was say why, I could see that wasn't true.
Martin Hurych
Thank you very much. Can we materialize this into a bonus, which at this point is already pinned around here somewhere around this episode?
Dalibor Herbrich
We will certainly be happy to add.
Martin Hurych
Thank you very much. I wish you well for the app, for the company, for you and that you shuffle the cards nicely here and get students and graduates into companies, I would love that.
Dalibor Herbrich
Thank you very much for the invitation.
Martin Hurych
If we've shown you a slightly clearer path to recruiting your next or your first student or graduate to your company today, we've done our job with Dalibor brilliantly. At a time like this, I'm going to ask you to like, comment on this episode or forward this episode to your HR department or a friend, a friend where it might also be handy. I will reiterate my invitation to subscribe to the newsletter on the websitewww.martinhurych.com/newsletter . Like I said, if you check out the /back of that same website, there's already a clear guide hanging somewhere by this episode on what to do right to get to that dream first student or graduate. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, and not just in recruitment, thanks.
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