Retaining highly skilled tech workers is a huge challenge for recruiters in this tech-driven ultra-competitive era of recruiting. In order to do so, there are a few key insights recruiters should be aware of.

Attracting and hiring STEM workers is anything but easy in today’s recruiting climate. And with employers constantly battling each other for the best and brightest—sourcing is only a part of the equation. An equally formidable challenge is talent retention.

Currently, there’s an acute shortage of skilled developers actively looking for work. Organizations spend thousands of dollars in recruiting talent, with the HR efforts that goes into sourcing and hiring tech talent and the cost associated with onboarding and training, the costs associated with a hire gone bad are really high. 

The demand for tech talent is at an all-time high. According to the Harris Allied 2014 Tech Hiring and Retention Survey finding and hiring top tech talent is the biggest concern for hiring managers—closely followed by retaining talent. Therefore, retention should be high on the list of priorities for recruiters and talent acquisition (TA) teams. Accordingly, relevant measures should be put into place early in the tenure of new employees.

Wondering what it takes to prevent prized team members from jumping ship as soon as a better opportunity comes knocking at their door? Here are a few actionable tips to help hiring teams stay ahead of the curve and retain the talent they work so hard to attract and hire. 

1) Become Fluent in Tech Terminology

As a recruiter or hiring manager, there’s a good chance you won’t be familiar with the granular details and responsibilities of many of the positions for which you’re hiring. If you want to build a long-term relationship with tech workers, the ability to “speak their language” will pay off in spades.

Fluency in technical terminology does not entail that you need to learn programming languages yourself. You just need to cover the basics and acquire a cursory knowledge of the positions you’re looking to fill. Let’s say you’ve been tasked with finding a Java software engineer for your company. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll need to engage candidates for that position in lengthy discourse about databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle.

However, if you enter the interview with some basic understanding of those platforms and why they matter for the role, you’ll have a better idea of how to guide the conversation, learn about the candidate’s strengths and interests, and potentially their pain points or weaknesses. All of this will be useful information to include when reporting back to the hiring team.

2) Emphasize Benefits Over Compensation 

The pool of tech talent is largely comprised of millennials who, with their positive, can-do attitude, take a free-wheeling approach towards career direction and employment in general. Hiring and retaining the generation of millennial workers who have proved themselves as workplace innovators and adept at learning new technologies on the go can be a real challenge for recruiters. 

Gone are the days when stability, job security and high salaries ranked top in the list of job seekers’ desired benefits. Skilled tech workers today can already command high salaries and associated perks. To many candidates, flexible working arrangements, student loan repayment assistance, and professional/career development are factors of equal or great importance when contemplating career decisions.

In this regard, it’s absolutely necessary to be forward-thinking. Many top-tier companies already have unique, attractive benefits packages in place. Doing so is a competitive advantage. Failing to do so could be irreparably damaging to your recruiting and retention efforts.

3) Retire the College Degrees in Favor of Experience

Rejecting candidates that don’t tick the boxes of formal education is one of the easiest ways an organization can miss the boat on talent. Technical expertise is hard to find and if recruiters insist on playing by the book, it is likely that candidates who are potentially a good fit for the organization may get missed out on. 

These days a number of developers are self-taught. With options like Coursera and Udemy, candidates can easily access university-level courses and training without matriculating at an institution. According to Stack Overflow’s 2018 Global Developer Hiring Landscape report, almost 90 percent of developers said that they have learned a new language outside of their formal education. 

Furthermore, high profile companies like Google, IBM, and Apple no longer require applicants to hold a four-year degree. In fact, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook recently said that about half of Apple’s US employment last year was made up of people who didn’t have four-year degrees. Additionally, he asserted that many colleges do not teach the skills that are most needed in today’s workforce, like coding.

To that end, it’s important that recruiters begin reigning in any bias they might have against autodidacts and applicants without degrees from accredited universities.

4) Convey the Strength of Your Company Culture

Candidates are more likely to remain with a company and be engaged if their personal values match those of their employers. Therefore, it’s important to clearly communicate those values early in the recruiting process to avoid misunderstanding, disengagement, and employer dissatisfaction—all of which contribute to poor retention. 

In the US, the average employee tenure is right around four years. That’s not long. As a result, it’s now more important than ever for employers to strategically think about how they can hold onto their workforce. Few measures are as effective as a solid company culture, which is a truly binding force.

Want more insight on technical recruiting? We recommend reading the following post: 5 Technical Recruiting Insights from Over 100K Coding Tests.

New research says the skills gap is the product of low unemployment, but this new report may be missing the point.

Earlier this year a report from American Economic Association spurred articles by the Washington Post and Vox triumphantly proclaiming the ‘skills gap’ to be solved – since it never existed at all.

The response to these articles on Twitter was mixed, with one economisttweeting, “Every time you hear someone say ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ add the phrase ‘at the wage I want to pay.’” At the same time,  many recruiters simply retweeted the stories for conversational fodder without committing to an affirmative or negative stance.

Economic analysis and predictions are esoteric practices, and the public doesn’t seem too surprised when pundits get it wrong, so the news of a labor crisis — given credence by the Obama administration and the US Chamber of Commerce — being totally discredited disappeared by the next day’s news cycle.

We couldn’t let it go. We reached out to SmartRecruiters followers in a casual Twitter poll, and 60 percent of respondents named ‘skills shortage’ as their top sourcing challenge. Granted, our sample size was certainly not large enough to make a claim, either way, but it did make us take a closer look at the American Economics Association study, and — as you may have guessed — there’s more to the skills gap than ‘true or false’.

It seems that when the US Chamber of Commerce and then-President Obama talk about the ‘skills gap’, they’re referring to the digital transformation making many laborers obsolete, but when American Economics Association talks about the ‘skills gap’, they’re talking about the degree and skill inflation within job ads.

The thesis of the research from Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel Shoag, and Joshua Ballance argues that when unemployment rises, employers can be choosier and require more skills from candidates. Thus the skills gap is a self-perpetuated, non-emergency resulting, in large part, from the financial crises of 2008.

Indeed, the analysis of over 36 million job ads from 2007 to 2012 does show a significant uptick in skill requirements. For example, jobs that previously required a high school education minimum began asking for candidates with four-year degrees. Employers acknowledged this phenomenon as a conscious decision in the report, saying, “the recession is a wonderful opportunity to acquire top talent.”

The question still remains, does this report show the skills gap is a lie? If we look at it from a digital transformation perspective, then no. This digital transformation skills gap, cited by the White House and the US Chamber of Commerce, is about a shortage of IT skills, a shortage which is still very real.

According to a 2018 Statista report, the largest deficits in tech are in Big Data/ Analytics, Technical Architecture, and Security/Resilience. And, it’s not just tech companies that need IT workers, as IT skills are necessary for any business to compete in today’s economy. Even the mom and pop store on the corner needs to consider web presence and data security.

So, if neither is wrong what does this report really tell us about today’s talent economy. We turned to Sarah Wilson, head of people at SmartRecruiters, for some practitioner insight into the conundrum.

Is there actually a skills gap?

It is accurate to say when the unemployment rate is higher and the candidate pool is more plentiful, companies become more choosy and require more experience and education. However, when people refer to a skills gap, they usually are talking about technical skills.

The skills gap in the tech space is ongoing, especially with emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence. In many areas, technology is advancing faster than the workforce.

I think as more and more new tech emerges, companies (especially large ones) will need to figure out how to upskill their existing workforce because allowing them to become obsolete isn’t a sustainable business model. I see a trend of accountability on the part of the business to provide opportunities for development.

Do recruiters have an exaggerated view of the skills gap?

The tools that we as recruiters traditionally used to engage talent aren’t delivering like they used to. Now that almost every company has a LinkedIn recruiter license, any quality candidate is inundated with in-mails and emails about new job opportunities.

Just as employers take advantage of high unemployment, candidates can be choosier when unemployment is low. Recruiters need to be creative with how they find and connect with talent pools that might even involve sharpening up their tech skills.

Meet Urska Srsen: Co-founder of Bellabeats, a  startup that creates beautiful and functional health-monitoring devices for women and a Forbes 30-Under-30 for 2016.

The wearables market is no joke. Wearable tech grew by 17% in 2017. That means 310.4M units sold worldwide, and a projected revenue of $30.5 billion by year’s end.

Wearable health devices, are expected to reach 9.4 billion by 2022, making for a compound annual growth rate of 14.9% from 2017 to 2022. Wowza.

Even with a giant like YCombinator behind them, Bellabeat knew they were in for a fight when they entered the market in 2014. What started as Urska Srsen’s passion project with her mom and a friend from surf camp could have a huge impact on healthcare, but if they were going to compete with Nike and Apple, they couldn’t just bring more of the same.

Turns out the wearable health-tech market had been more of the same for some time, overlooking a key demographic. Women. Enter Bellabeat, and their signature product, the Leaf: a health-tracking jewelry line made from a wood composite that can be worn as a bracelet, pendant or brooch.

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The mistake in thinking that women are a niche market created a blind spot, and Bellabeat was ready to swoop in and make a name for itself. Like, women comprise half the population, why had no one thought of something like this earlier?

Since its inception Bellabeat has gone from two friends with a big idea in Urska’s native Slovenia to a global company on its way to unicorn status (knock on wood) with Urska named as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 in 2016 at the age of 26.

I met co-founder Urska by chance at HR Tech Amsterdam, like me she was in search of some coffee and a quiet place to sit, a tall order at the bustling convention. The press lounge offered both, bearded hipster barista to boot. She melted into her chair as we sipped cortados, her relaxed posture the only giveaway of how tiring the last few years have been. Even so, she talked with excitement about her journey with Bellabeats in the hectic world of startups as I settled in for the story of how it all began at with her noticing the gender gap in the wearables market. To her, it  was glaringly obvious:

I saw women excluded from the health-tech world in two ways, product experience and functionality. When we developed the leaf we were actually the first ones to make a wearable health-check product that included reproductive health tracking – others were just tracking activities and sleep.

Released in the fall of 2014, Leaf filled the void for women who wanted to track more than the cosmetic aspects of health. Urska shakes her head with a slight smile as she explains:

Women want to track more than the fitness or beauty aspects. Our health concerns change throughout our life; fitness, family planning, pregnancy monitoring, and into menopause. These can all at some point take priority depending on our phase of life. We wanted to create a product where we can track different things throughout our lives.

Since then, Bellabeat has added three more pieces to their still-expanding product line. Shell was released in November 2016 as the first non-invasive baby heartbeat listener. It allows mothers to listen to, record and share their baby’s heartbeat. This was followed in May 2016 by Spring, the first AI powered smart water bottle that gives tailored intake goals and hydration reminders. And most recently, Airie, the health coaching app that turns all your data into manageable plans that include guided meditation, recipes, and action goals for exercise.

Urska is optimistic about the future of these products, especially how they could improve the lives of the users as well as how we approach healthcare:

We see these tools transforming women’s lives in stages. Right now we have several products that relate to the same system and give our users insight into their overall wellbeing through data. Airie takes the user from tracking to coaching. Our plan is  to deepen knowledge of what the data tells us. The next step would be to have that become part of professional preventative care at some point.

Urska and her co-founder Sandro Mur met at windsurfing school in Croatia, where they discovered a shared interest beyond catching waves, in, you guessed it, health tech. They worked with Urska’s mother, who was a practicing OBGYN, to develop a product that would allow women to do routine prenatal check-ups from home.

In the course of this project they realized two things.

1. What they were doing was revolutionary and could elevate the level of healthcare  by making it more accessible and cheaper.
2. The healthcare system is not setup to adopt remote care and patients aren’t accustomed to monitoring their own health.

The patients in their prenatal monitoring project showed Urska and Sandro that they would need to help users to become more active in their own healthcare so they decided to focus on a consumer product that would introduce people to health tracking and hopefully turn them from passive to active agents for their well being.

That’s when they decided they needed to focus on a consumer product that would introduce the users to health tracking, and turn people from passive into active when it comes to their well being – which lead them to produce the Leaf.

In the US, Bellabeats largest market, the use for remote health tracking is immediately clear. Pregnancy in the US costs an average of $30,000-50,000 a year with a single ultrasound running at a cool $600, with even greater expense incurred from pregnancy complications stemming from obesity, stress, and lack of access. Remote checkups could help women and their partners monitor pregnancies at reduced cost and elevated quality, thanks to the consistent and constant collection of user data.

Which is all fine, but no one’s going to wear any of this stuff if it’s ugly, and this is where Urska’s unconventional background as a sculptor comes in. (Yes, sculptor.) Urska planned to be a sculptor from the age of nine and realized that goal when she attended the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 22.

The surface of the tech we were seeing when we started was clunky. People have to actually wear the wearables for them to be effective. So a poor design is a huge concern. I think we made something that is approachable and that women will actually want to wear.

As it turns out, women do, and not just in the US. Bellabeats have expanded into the EU and Australia, with China soon to follow.

The chinese market is really exciting because of their wholistic approach to healthcare. Chinese healthcare is traditionally focused on prevention, and I think our product caters towards that approach.

So, new markets and big investors like SV Angel and Crunchfund coming on board. But not everyone saw Bellabeats’ vision when the startup – which is now among the top 5 in the Y combinator series 14 – started out, racking up rejections Zagreb, Croatia  and Berlin, Germany before finally finding a home in San Francisco.

Even with the superpower of YC behind them (the total market cap of all YC companies is over $85 billion) there are some lessons Bellabeats learned on their own:

HR is extremely important and I wish we knew that sooner! A lot of startups wait too long before they hire someone to grow their team and HR processes. Things get really chaotic when you’re trying to fulfill investors’ expectations in terms of growth and revenue, making your customers happy, building the best team and then also managing each individual’s satisfaction within all that all at the same time.

She catches her breath and continues:

HR’s most important role is to bring structure into processes concerning hiring, managing people’s expectations, and culture creation. It takes a huge load of off the founder’s shoulders.”

Each hire could be the difference between success and failure, and in the scrappy world of startups, the stakes are even more pronounced:

Hiring and growing your team is one of the key components in building a successful company. Culture and direction is, to some extent, intentionally planned and drawn by the founders. But the flourishing of those ideals, at a certain point, depend on the team you’ve built. We’re still learning how to refine the process, have several stages of interviewing before we hire someone and still we’re not always right, but I’ve found that with time it tends to even out. People who are a good fit stay and people who are not, usually move on.”

Urska doesn’t have a traditional business background, so when she interviews people, she likes to emphasize how they will fit into the brand versus a more traditional CV approach.

I like to ask where their dream job would be, besides Bellabeat, of course. I want to know what about that company and its brand would attract them. Their answer gives me a lot of insight into their knowledge of the marketplace and what excites them as a worker.

What excites Urska as a worker?

The entrepreneurial lifestyle is dynamic traveling everywhere requires a lot of personal sacrifice, but I love what I do, I think our product helps people and, to me, that’s powerful.

For the best tech candidates, you want to post your open jobs on tech job boards. Yes, you will have some luck on larger, more general boards, but when you’re looking for specialized skills it’s best to go to specialized markets.

Nowadays, niche sites account for 62% of jobs posted. There’s no reason to miss out on the opportunities that niche job boards provide.

Best Boards for Tech Recruiters to Post Tech Jobs

Dice.com is the “career hub” for tech. Dice builds talent communities. Candidates interested in the same things or with the same skills will congregate in these digital communities making it easy to source for exactly what you’re looking for.

GitHub is a code sharing community. When you post your open jobs here you are engaging with a dedicated and skilled group of talent. GitHub encourages building together- post your tech jobs here and you’ll build relationships with potential candidates.

Careers2.0 is stackoverflow’s job board. Careers2.0 brings you the top tech jobs and top tech talent. Posting a job on Careers2.0 introduces hiring managers and recruiters to over 20 million developers to source from.

TechCareers by Beyond.com offers more than just job listings, but also educational tools as well as networking opportunities.  TechCareers takes a well-rounded approach to the job search providing everything candidates and employers need.

ITJobPro is a global tech sourcing solution. A job board, “without borders” IT Job Pro will help you find the best IT candidates regardless of location. The right candidate is out there; it’s just a matter of finding them. IT Job Pro helps you look.

RubyNow is THE job board for Ruby developers. This job board is particularly niche but it guarantees you find exactly what you are looking for in a candidate. RubyNow offers full-time positions as well as contract.

CrunchBoard gives you access to millions of TechCrunch readers – an Internet savvy and technically inclined bunch. CrunchBoard is one of the most popular job boards for internet and tech jobs. Surprised? Didn’t think so…

Mashable is not only a great news source, but also a great people source.  Mashable’s job boards are not limited to tech, but they always have tons of tech positions. No matter the job description, Mashable has got your match.

When you post a job, put yourself in the best position to get top talent. Generic job boards have their benefits, but when you are looking for specific skills, or highly specialized professionals niche job boards are the way to go.

Related articles: 50 Best Job Boards According to Alexa, 50 Best Niche Job Boards.

When it comes to making recruitment a science, Carl Sweet, Marketo‘s Director of Talent Acquisition, does everything but break out the beakers. His company provides powerful marketing automation software for fast-growing small companies and global enterprises, and its’ talent acquisition practices align with a marketers’ dream for big data precision.

“It all started when managers and executives kept asking me, ‘How many people do I have to interview for this job?'” said Sweet.

He dug into the history of hiring. By storing the information of all past hires, Sweet learned the average of number of candidates and interviews required to make each hire. Then, he considered the performance of those hires to measure if Marketo sourced and interviewed the optimal number of candidates. Through years of recruiting and research, Sweet developed the company ratio of 80 candidates: 8 interviews: 1 hire.

“It’s about having just enough resumes; not too many and not too few.The ratio helps me decide which recruiting channels to open up. I need the best talent, but I don’t want to create any extra work for the recruiter.”

The implications of an inefficient recruitment process seep into the budgets of every department within an organization.

“The ratio allows me to have a good influx of people,” explained Sweet. “At the same time, interviewing’s expensive. If you average 10 interviews instead of 8, think about those extra two hours of lost productivity across the entirety of an organization.”

Sweet proceeded to rattle off the astronomical number of potentially lost man hours at organizations larger than his own, ad-lib, before settling back in to the concrete effects at each one of his departments. Sweet also unveiled a picture of the Silicon Valley labor market by explaining how function changes the ratio; “for finance positions, the ratio is 120 candidates: 15 interviews: 1 hire; and for engineers the ratio is 20 candidates: 5 interviews: 1 hire.”

Sweet is building out a ratio of candidates to interview to hire for every function and experience level. When Sweet thinks recruiting, he thinks science, and Marketo is better off for it.

“I have to decide what recruiting channels to open up, and the ratio is where I start.”

80 candidates: 8 interviews,: 1 hire represents a tech company’s necessity to win the war for talent. As Sweet says, “It’s always very data driven.”

Carl Sweet is Director of Staffing at Marketo, provider of powerful marketing automation software for fast-growing small companies and global enterprises

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates, generate reports, and make the right hire.

SmartRecruiters Office Manager Melinda Johnson explains how our tech startup, SmartRecruiters, is creating its new place of business:

Over the past 6 weeks, our 750 square foot office space in SOMA has become a bit…shall we say…cozy. Desks (and the people to fill them) have doubled and with no end in sight to SmartRecruiters hiring, I expect we’ll soon be hanging desks from the ceiling.

SmartRecruiters Office Manager Melinda Johnson Knocks Down Walls.

This is a not uncommon problem for innovative tech companies in San Francisco at this time. Our products, our people(!), our brilliance booms quickly, unexpectedly, in spurts like fireworks on the Fourth of July… but our office space has yet to boom with us. So, what is one to do?  Look for a new office location, of course. I led the search. However, with so many companies booming simultaneously in such a small geographical area, the search for a new space became a race to get there first.

After two false starts, I am happy to report that SmartRecruiters has found our next home! We were unexpectedly lucky and, as David Smooke has said, “These are big walls.” We have moved north, toward Market Street. Our new office sits where SOMA Meets Downtown, a 5,000 square foot cement blank canvas with 20-foot ceilings (see more pictures below).

We’re half way through the remodeling process.

Walls have been torn down.  New walls have been built elsewhere.  Every day, more decisions need to be made – paint colors, desk layout, Foosball table handle shapes – all important decisions necessary to make our new office space as sleek and user-friendly as the great technology we will develop once we’re there.

Moving day is racing towards us.  Our excitement is tangible as we huddle together in our small office, sharing desks and good-naturedly maneuvering through the daily challenges that arise when you stuff 10 folks into an one room office. Of course we will miss the office that we have called home for the last year and a half.  But we have more brilliance waiting to shine and now we have the space to sparkle.

Melinda Johnson loves to create organization out of chaos.  She is an artistic yet precise tech geek with a degree in Performing Arts.  Master of all things administrative, she’d be happy to build you a web page, a complex travel itinerary, a benefits plan or a piece of furniture.  She enjoys reading post-apocalyptic science fiction novels, coercing yarn into knit and crochet objects and photographing the world around her. Also, she is the Office Manager at SmartRecruiters.

Check out some of our tech office building progress so far:

The tech industry is hiring, and SmartRecruiters has added all the top boards for tech jobs to your software. If your company needs designers, programmers, business executives, data analysts, or any other information technology professional, SmartRecruiters has job sites for that. You can now post to some of the best software developer communities, such as StackOverflow and 37signals, some of the best designer communities, such as Coroflot and Authentic Jobs, as well as, some of the best tech publications, such as Mashable and Wired. Here are all the tech job boards:

Designers

37signals job board focuses on programmers, designers, and iPhone developers jobs,and is used by Apple and American Express.

Authentic Jobs specializes in jobs for web professionals, including design, development, mobile, apps, content strategy, and more, and its users include Facebook and ESPN.

Coroflot is a global job network for creative professionals that distributes jobs in graphic design, product design, UX and interaction design, across the best design publications. Each posting is 90 days.

Krop is a designers’ community and job board that also broadcasts jobs through industry blogs, job search websites, and social networks.

Developers

StackOverflow is a community of professional developers and technologists, as well as, a job board. Reach 15,000+ Software Developers.

GitHub is the largest code host and most social site in the world. Reach their engaged programmers, developers, and tech people here.

Marketing

Talent Zoo is a job board for top advertisers, marketers,  and news media industry professional. Over 200,000 registered candidates receive the newest job listings daily. Each posting is 60 days.

Tech Industry At Large

Mashable is the blog for “All That’s New on the Web” by Peter Cashmore. Reach savvy tech readers here.

Wired is one of the top publications on how technology changes the world around us. Reach worldly tech readers here.

VentureBeat is a technology blog on innovative companies and the forward-thinking executives behind them. Reach tech, marketing, product management talent here.

Content Producers

paidContent is the online media hub that covers news and analysis of the digital media business. Reach the best digital content producers here.

And don’t forget the top tech sites we already support, such as CrunchBoard, Dice, and LinkedIn. Also don’t forget to check out top job sites by niche.

If we have missed any tech job site where you prefer to post jobs, just let us know, and we’ll dive into making it an add-on.

Post jobs for free to all these boards, and more, in one click and use SmartRecruiters job board software to post jobs.

The explosion of job boards and syndication platforms means it is relatively easy to get job opportunities in front of candidates.  New technologies that parse resumes and give scores on the skill-fit of candidates make filtering and hiring easier.  Still time and again companies spend thousands of dollars hiring then firing the wrong candidates, after missing the mark on whether a candidate has the right cultural fit for a given office or department.

Employees Work Longer, Harder, and for Less Pay if the Cultural Fit is Strong:

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, which sold to Amazon in 2009 for over a billion dollars, is known for placing a high importance on cultural fit.

In an interview Hsieh said, “We’ve actually passed on a lot of really talented people that we know would make an impact to our top or bottom line but if we know they’re not a culture fit we won’t hire them. Similarly, the company will fire people even if they’re doing their job perfectly if they’re bad for the culture.”

This statement says a lot.  Hsieh recognizes that having a team that gels, will help foster more collaboration, better ideas, and in total a greater impact than a more talented hire would.

Nike is another great example — in Phil Knight’s years as a young entrepreneur, he built a culture of sport fanaticism, which was shared by all the Nike employees.  This culture led to people being called “a Nike guy” (or girl) and drove a competitive spirit and kept top employees within the company far longer than the Bureau of Labor Statistics 4.4 year average.

Student Employment Brand:

At InternMatch we have found that a large hole exists in the area of student employment brand.  While many companies struggle to build a consistent and well publicized employment brand, most companies fall flat when displaying the face of their work environment.  Successful companies consider their future lifeblood.

It also means students end up making important career decisions in a vacuum of any significant employer knowledge.  For example, the average engineering student knows a bit about Microsoft’s culture, but most have little insight into what it is like to work as a software intern at a growing tech company like Dropbox, or to be a technology intern at Fortune 500 beverage-company like Coca-Cola.  This lack of knowledge can lead to sub-optimal career decisions.

We are currently rolling out a product to a few exclusive partners that is looking to address these challenges by showcasing video, photos, and other typically decentralized content, in order to communicate a company’s student brand.  Chegg, 500 Startups and Jive are a few companies showcasing these community pages.

The goal is to help employers build a stronger student employment brand, hire interns who understand the company culture and convert more of these interns into full time hires.  Ernst and Young exemplifies what can be accomplished by focusing on this goal.  They have invested heavily in their student employment brand and at the recent ERE conference in San Diego, reported that they hire a ridiculously high 90% of their interns, building company culture from the ground up.

Nathan Parcells is co-founder and Director of Marketing at InternMatch.com. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, Nathan joined long-time friend and co-founder, Andrew Maguire in starting InternMatch to build a better way for students to find great internships.