Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2012, and describes a 2012 recruiting event, with 17 large companies in Spain, 200 students from international programmes and a Madrid hotel, presented as recent news.
We can be true professionals at studying, earning degrees and master’s with tremendous ease. We’ll be full of knowledge, but sometimes we’re so “slow” (if you’ll pardon the expression) that our education doesn’t run in parallel with the productivity of the business. Companies need trained employees capable of increasing that productivity. That is what we call talent, and it is usually hidden: it doesn’t show at first glance in candidates.
That’s why 17 large companies in Spain have joined forces to look for the best university talent. What I’m describing here is an experience of major companies in the search for the best university talent, and it can be adapted to our own company to make the search for the ideal candidate, someone with personal and professional skills on top of their own particular talent, more precise.
The experience
Two hundred students from international programmes looking for their first job were brought together with executives from seventeen companies with significant work in human resources management.
The meeting was held at a hotel in Madrid, in a relaxed setting that let these young people build social relationships, break down hierarchies and more easily develop professional relationships and opportunities to create new jobs.
The aim is to provide ideas for finding work, improving one’s job situation and generating business.
The results
From the student’s point of view, the experience is about widening your network of contacts and getting to know the big companies’ job offers so you can match your working future with your personal interests. That was the reflection of a law and business administration student who is doing a project on the merger of British Airways and Iberia in the office of Iberia’s chief financial officer.
The outcome of this meeting is that the students have met the people who hand out job opportunities at large companies. Some of those companies will match their personal interests; they’ll know whom to approach and, most importantly, those people know them, know how they think and what their professional qualities are.
As for the companies, they have met 200 great young people with plenty of talent. Surely some of them fit into their future plans. They’ll give them a small or big opportunity and then bring them into the company.
The participating students exchanged ideas, knowledge and experiences among themselves. They combined one person’s ideas with other people’s thinking, and that fusion produced the best results in the projects the companies presented.
Featured image: COD Newsroom, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
