Emerging Trends from the Early Career Space with Dimitar Stanimiroff

Welcome, everybody. Johnny Campbell here, CEO and co founder of Social Talent and your host for the Shortlist. This week on the Shortlist, we're going to be talking about emerging trends from the early career hiring space. And joining us today is somebody who's been a friend of mine for many, many years who has access to the literally a treasure trove of data that I think is going to be super relevant for all of you who are interested to know what the early career talent space is doing right now. What's happened with COVID where are we going? What are the trends? What are the data? And we're going to get into all of that. And for those of you listening live to us today on YouTube, on LinkedIn, we're going to take your questions. So please do ask those questions today around early career hiring or share your insights with us and we'll read them out and try and contribute to that conversation. Just a quick reminder that the Shortlist is a weekly show that broadcasts live on LinkedIn and YouTube, but is also available as a podcast. You can listen to our podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. And you can find a list of all of our previous episodes and our future upcoming shows@sotothan.com the shortlist. So back to today's topic and today's guests. So today's guest joins us from an organization called Handshake, which if you're in the United States, you might be very, very familiar with. If you're not, you might be wondering, who are Handshake and what is this all about? Particularly perhaps in a world where we're not really able to do many handshakes right now. Certainly Elbow Shake would seem a more appropriate name for 2020, but since its 2013 founding, Handshake has become the leading early career community in the US and now looking to do that across the globe with over 7 million students, a thousand university and college partners, and half a million employers, including all of the Fortune 500, it operates with such volume that trends on Handshake are actually trends of that talent demographic in the wider world and certainly in the US and joining us today on the show, and I'm delighted to welcome him, is Dimitar Stanimiroff, who is the head of EMEA for Handshake, recently joined the company, joined them in the pandemic. And he's going to be joining us and explaining to us a little bit more about the trends that he is seeing and the organization are seeing on Handshake. But maybe, Demi, you can maybe share with us a little bit more about your career because you've been in this space for the wider hiring space for a lot longer than 2020 and certainly we've known each other in this world for a lot longer than just the last few months.

Yes, absolutely. Well, first and foremost, thank you for having me, Johnny. Absolutely bumped to be here with you today. I've been in the space for almost as long as you, I believe. So I believe right now. We've spent the better part of a decade in the talent acquisition industry. Started off completely accidental in 2008 building one of the first virtual interviewing applications, asynchronous interviewing applications at the time. Then I spent five years at Stack Overflow, which is the largest talent community for professional developers in the world. And from there I moved on to do something quite different. I went on a three year hiatus and I started a company in the sales forecasting and analytics space. And after a short break I'm back in the talent attraction space with Handshake where as you said, I head out our European expansion.

And for anyone who's a podcast lover like me and Dimitar, I encourage you to check out the Heresy podcast which Dimitar ran for many, many has some amazing shows particularly interested in enterprise sales SaaS and that kind of world is. I know I've particularly enjoyed some of your shows. There's some real gold in there as well. But I want to get into today's topic. I want to talk about early career talent and you know, this is what we do with the shortlist every single week. We start the show with the current stuff. What's going on in the real world? Niall, it's time for the news. So this is kind of topical and typical of articles that I'm sure you've seen over the last few months and I know I have. This is from CNBC and it's actually an Irish woman who's working for and now working for an Irish organization called Ding as their chro. But she previously was spent six years as Facebook's kind of a VP of HR for international businesses. And this article talks about her concern which I think are shared by a lot of leaders in the people space about how graduates potentially this year in 2020 are going to miss out due to the coronavirus. Interested to hear your thoughts on this Dimitar, in terms of general consensus of this, do you think that graduates are missing out this year because of the coronavirus? Is that a thing and if so, to what extent?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it really depends on how we look at it in terms of what are they missing out on? Right. So you and I had this interesting convers. I think last week. It was where we spoke about the unusual shape of the recession and the recovery that we're seeing right now. So if you kind of think of graduates missing out on various opportunities that they might have had available to them pre Covid, then certainly there might be certain areas and certain parts of the economy that have been severely affected. And if you're, for example, we're looking to pursue a career in travel, let's say, or I don't know what else, hospitality, you might be at a disadvantage in this current situation. On the flip side, we've seen areas such as tech and engineering, customer success support, kind of the world of SAS continue to boom. So those students, I'd say, certainly not at a disadvantage. And the other way in which I guess I think about this is, you know, in the context of a fully virtual graduate scheme or internship. I think this is what I think you probably are perhaps at a slight disadvantage in terms of not being able to get exposed to certain social interactions and serendipitous engagements at work. But apart from that, I think, you know, it could have been much worse.

Put it this way, it really hit me the other day. I walked my, my three, three of my boys to the bus stop every morning to go to school, right? And I walk all four, including the baby, but I walk him home, right? So three boys, put them on the bus and off they go. And I was standing at the bus waiting with the, with, with the kids. I looked up and I saw a kid, it must have been 18, 19 years old. And he was in his bedroom and his window was overlooking the bus stop and he was online. And I was realizing at 8, 15 in the morning, he's in university. And that is a reality for many, many students right now is that going to university means flicking on your laptop or ice logging in and learning. And it's very different. You know, when I was 18 and went to university, what I was doing at that time in the morning in university was very, very different. And my day was, my day looked very, very different. But also the opportunity that maybe presented me, looking at, let's say, the cohort who would have graduated in 2020, I suppose when they, when they enter their final year in maybe September, October 19, their prospects look very different. But I do agree your point's very well made around what is called the K shaped recovery, you know, where you have a certain Business absolutely booming and certain sectors and businesses not. And still, still stagnating again. I go back to my graduate days when one of the chains that I applied for for a graduate job because I get, I was a business graduate. So business graduates don't have a clue what they want to do. At least I didn't. And I applied to one of the UK pub chains and I got into the graduate program. I didn't accept it because it meant moving to the uk, which didn't suit me at the time. But I imagine like that that's a career opportunity in hospitality that many people would have pursued. They're all closed and I doubt they're accepting graduate jobs. But I'm interested to hear your perspective because Handshake, I admit I was new to the product. Right. Battle me in this talent space that I wasn't familiar more with Handshake and I was very interested in with scale. Because before we get into perhaps some of the insights you can share, I think it's really important just to kind of for anyone who doesn't understand the business model and the different individuals who use Handshake, that kind of three, the three three sided model that is Handshake and who uses the technology and the platform, I was wondering maybe would you mind just sharing with us a little bit about how that works in the scale and then we can get back into the kind of maybe some of the insights you can share with us around early career topic that you're aware of.

Absolutely. And you shouldn't feel bad by the way, not having heard about Handshake. I had not heard about Handshake myself before a month before I joined. So that's on us. I think we've done tons of great work and have been so focused on execution that we have forgotten to share the results that we're getting with the rest of the world. Now onto the business model. It's a really interesting one, one that you don't really see very often at all. So as you mentioned, it's a three sided marketplace. So we connect university partners, students and employers into a single network. And what's quite unique about this is how it all comes together. So it all really starts with trying to tackle, I suppose, structure of inefficiencies around the way career centers at universities have operated historically. See, if you think about that for a moment, they would normally. These career centers would normally operate using some sort of legacy software, which presents all sorts of challenges both for the people working in the career center and particularly with employers who are trying to interact with the career center and engage the students at the university. So Handshake first started off providing a state of the art software as a service offering which replaced whatever legacy software the career center was using to engage with the students and to engage with the employers. And in doing so, in partnering with the university, Hamzech now uses this as an acquisition channel for students to be added to the network. So what this means is that once we partner with the university, whether this is Oxford, Cambridge, actually we don't have Oxford on board yet, but Cambridge, Liverpool, York, you name it, all the students at the university will have a LinkedIn like profile created for them, but specifically designed for the 18 to 24 year demographic created for them, which then they can decide to make public for employers to engage with them. About 93% of all students make those profiles publicly available. And if you think what this allows then employers to do is to actually move away from I suppose what has been the traditional model of recruiting early talent, which is very reactive. You would post and pray and see who kind of applies to your job ads to a way more proactive, active way of recruiting which would entail searching for specific skill sets or specific demographic of students and engaging with them directly, trying to bring them into your final and your institution.

And it's funny, you know, the early career market, for those of you who are listening, who are active in that and work every day in the early career talent space, you'll get this. It hasn't changed a lot in years. And you know, somebody might argue that that hiring hasn't changed a lot. I think it has, right? I think it has changed massively the last 10 years in the kind of professional hiring space, let's call it. And I remember being asked to go to help work with a team in Japan last year around early career hiring. This is a massive US multinational who were trying to basically, you know, really kind of fix their early career hiring across the different campuses across Japan that they were hiring in, largely in Tokyo, but, but also elsewhere. And you know, they warned me that I need to probably brief myself on the different ways it's done in Japan. I was like, oh gosh, I have a fair idea of how early career hiring is done elsewhere. So I don't go in naively as the guy from Europe not having a clue. So I did a bunch of interviews with their team to understand how does it work. And after two months I was like, this is like there's no difference this and there's no difference in what they do and anyone else in the world. In fact, it's, it's really, you know, this. And they weren't bad at this. They were like everybody else. They literally, you know, ran, they ran seminars on site in universities. They'd ran some online webinars. The online webinars were, didn't have, weren't gated, so they weren't capturing the attendees. So we're getting thousands of people watch them. But they'd know what you are. Right. They call it action at the end that had very low uptake, but they didn't have a clue who the audience was watching them on campus. They, you know, had reasonable attendance and they sent their senior execs in and they sent former, former alumni of that university or college to basically go on site within the first two years and say, hey, I joined this firm now, and it's great, is why you should do the same thing. I kind of said, well, who's, who's killing it? Who's beating you? And they named a couple of employers. I said, well, what are they doing? I was kind of waiting for the kind of big magic mystery. They said, well, they just have bigger ads on more buses and more, More, More billboards. I was like, what? Like print media advertise, you know, above the line, outside, door, outside stuff. Like, yeah, like, anyone doing interesting stuff. And like, there was one person who said, google are doing something interesting. Like, what are they doing? Like, okay, they're doing. They're, they're, they're, they're courting more influencers. They're trying to use. They have an influencer strategy on campus that was interesting. I wanted digitally and just the lack of digital, but I did see in the U.S. you know, going back to other employers, there were signs of, you know, even 2019 of companies who've begun to really embrace digital because it can be done.

Yeah.

There's a perception at the moment that everything's about to change. And finally we're going to see digital transformation in areas even such as early career talent. Is that true? Is it only just changing, Timothy? Or is it something that has been changing for a long time?

Yeah, well, I think this is, it's interesting how you look at it. I think, you know. And which part of the early talent journey are we talking about? I'd say. I'd say, especially again, if you take. Well, let me take a step back. So I think in the US we have already seen a significant shift moving from sort of the physical world to kind of building the talent identification attraction piece online quite early. And I Think I would argue that this has been mainly Handshake's doing because they were the first ones to provide the means that enable this digital transformation to occur. So I know you and I have spoken about this multiple times, but if you think about the impact that LinkedIn had on the wider talent acquisition industry, and I go 15 years ago, but definitely in the last 10 years before LinkedIn sourcing was incredibly hard and identifying talent directly was a skill only reserved for a handful of people, you being one of them. Right. And then LinkedIn really enabled that to occur at scale because they democratize access to all of these products, professionals that were online. I mean, of course there were certain hacks and certain skills that you had to learn to be even more efficient. But LinkedIn was the professional community that enabled that to happen. And it's interesting that the early talent space has really lagged behind in that regard because, and this is my personal belief, I mentioned this earlier, the 18 to 24 year demographic has been very elusive because the taxonomy needed to source someone and discover someone on LinkedIn is completely different to that needed for an 18 to 24 year old. Right. LinkedIn is a professional network and as such relies on you having professional experience for that taxonomy to be built and for you then to search. If I'm just in my first year, I might have, or second year at university, I might have some professional experience, but most likely it's not even relevant. It's some sort of STEM job that I did during summer to earn extra cash. Whatever it is this. So the skill set and the sort of the taxonomy again that is needed to search is very different. So if you think of again, like, has this changed? It has been changing because handshake enabled that to happen at scale. So just to kind of put this into context, in the U.S. the network has gone from five universities in year one to over a thousand six years later. And that translates into 7 million students, as you said. And in terms of alumni, you're looking at the network of 17 million students, right? And alumni. So that's, that's huge. And all of those people actually you can search and engage with directly. Right? So that's kind of where we start thinking of the talent engagement and identification. Well, sorry, identification attraction piece starting to shift online because the capability now exists and I think, you know, Covid has massively accelerated that. But also the other thing which is worth mentioning, which would have, I believe, taken a lot longer to happen, is now we're seeing that the following part of this journey, the talent engagement piece is also being shifted online. Right. Historically, this would have. Even with Handshake, if you look at some data from the previous years, Handshake has supported, I believe, up until this year, over 11,000 career fairs in the US alone. So employers would use Sunshade to engage students, kind of arrange meetings with them on campus, and then all the engagement will occur in the physical world, in campus. All of a sudden, this year, because of COVID that's not possible. So in the space of, I don't know, six months now, all of that engagement has shifted online. And we started seeing this very, very early on. So as early as March or September, we started looking at the sort of leading indicators that would indicate that we're kind of going through this digital transformation. And all of that were up and to the right number of messages sent on the platform, number of virtual fairs hosted, virtual events, virtual interviews, orders of magnitudes up compared to what they were, you know, the same time last year. So to cut the long story short, definitely, you know, we're definitely seeing this movement, and I would even argue that the movement has already happened. So it's not a matter of we're kind of experiencing a shift to virtual. The shift is already here. And there's an image I posted on LinkedIn about a month ago which captures. It's a graph that shows all the career fairs that were hosted on the Handshake network this time last year compared to what we're looking at this year. And you're looking basically of a mirror image of the same, same distribution, but one is all physical and the other one is virtual. So all of it has gone virtually this year. So, yeah, to cut a long story short, I would argue that the transformation has already occurred. I think it's just a matter of time before people start realizing it and adjusting their approach to recruiting.

A lot of the time when we digitize something that traditionally has happened in the real world, what we do is we take the real world version and we literally just digitize it. We make it online and then let's call that iteration one. Right. But what you find generally in most things, iteration two is, is kind of. Hang on a second. If we had a started digitally, we wouldn't have even done this first thing. So, yeah, yeah, you copy your, your physical process and you just move it online. And then after a time you realize that, that, that just doesn't really work because digital offers you so much more potential. So because a lot of people have said this to me in the early career space is like, how do we do virtual affairs career? You know, what are you starting to see through the network that you're exposed to as being some of the alternatives that are perhaps digital first ways to look at hiring that town space that aren't just moving online, what we used to do in the old physical world.

Yeah, that's actually a brilliant point that you make, I think, and it's interesting, I think various. So, you know, we're not the only player in the space in terms of providing technology to host virtual career fairs. We are by far the biggest one for sure. But I've seen other, other approaches and some of them have been very different to what we have done. So you're almost like a sim like version of a virtual fair where you have an avatar and you're walking through a digital space and you can stop in front of a banner. So we have taken a very different approach. So I'll tell you what we're seeing, but I do want to set the scene because we have taken a very different approach and it's very much in the context of what you described. We kind of looked at what a virtual career fair would look like if we were to build it from scratch without having to replicate what we know exists in the physical world. And we decided to lose some of the things that we knew from experience and from talking to thousands of students were not desirable and double down on the things that we knew students wanted to see more of. So simple example, you know, if you can go back in time, young Johnny queuing to speak to, I don't know, the pub chain operator at a physical fair, probably the line would have been huge. Lots of people in line, you're waiting, they're waiting. Finally, you know, so you're super frustrated, Your turn finally comes and there you are trying to have an authentic conversation with someone and they're, I don't know, 10 other people behind you looking at their watches and being like, oh, come on, you know. And from an employer standpoint as well, you know, they're so experienced. Experience is very, it really relies on, on serendipity and chance. Right. You just never know in, in, in, you know, in the physical world who might walk up to your stand and, you know, start the conversation. So if you think of like, you know, how you recreate this experience virtually, you know, there are two, two pieces to it. One is, I suppose, what happens pre fair. How do you ensure that you only engage with people and students that actually make sense for you? And I would argue this is beneficial both for yourself and the students, you don't want to be wasting the students time. You definitely don't want to be wasting your time as an employer. And the other piece is, how do we ensure that we have these kind of authentic conversations without the virtual queues? Who needs to be in a virtual queue? Obviously we've got quite a lot of exposure to virtual queues during lockdown. We've had enough of it. No one needs another ocado virtual queue. So the things that we kind of designed were to focus on efficiency and authenticity, making sure that you have these virtual engagements. So everything, for example in the context of a career fair, virtual career fair handshake, relies on this idea of pre scheduling appointments with employers. Whether this is a group session where you're speaking to as an employer, you're presenting and engaging with a wider audience of students, do one on one sessions. But everything relies on a schedule being built in advance and students signing up. And again, if you move a step back in that particular context of filling in those schedules, you actually on handshake could decide who you want to target specifically instead of leaving it up to chance to take those schedules. So that is sort of the background and in terms of trends, an interesting one that we have seen. And I'll just give you a bit more context as to what makes me qualified to speak about this. I mentioned handshake Historically up until this recruiting season had run 11,000 fairs in the physical world. By the end of this month we would have done 2,000 virtual fairs. So again, that makes us the largest provider of virtual recruiting fairs in the world. And one of the interesting thing is that the recruiting season in the US is virtually identical, pun not intended, but it's very much identical to the one here in the UK but takes place basically six weeks ahead of hours. So sitting here now, we have already seen a good over thousand fairs take place in the US on handshake. And one of the things that you're seeing is that there's a significant drop off between registration. So students actually saying yes, I'm interested and I would attend this fair and them actually booking a session with, with an employer. And you know, this kind of, we started seeing this quite early and at the time, you know, I was trying to make sense of this and thinking, you know, what is going on here? Why you know, students kind of probably being students, you know, they, you know, they receive an email from the university career center that they fear is going to be taking place on such and such date and then they say, yeah, I'm going to Register, but then they forget to book a session. But actually one thing looking now, especially that we've got so much data, one of the main reasons as to why, you know, the, the big kind of fallout between someone registering for a fair and booking a session is because most employers being new to this as well, wait until the very last minute to publish their schedule. So what would actually happen is a student, a student would receive the email from the university, they'll be great. I've got this, say economics and finance fair happening at my university. I'm an economics and finance graduate, I want to attend register and then I will start browsing all the employers that will be there on the day and try to book a session with one of them that be a one on one or group session. And a big chunk of them would have not actually uploaded their schedules up to a week before the fair, even days. I think the latest number I saw was 30, 30% don't have, 34% don't have their schedules up before a week before the schedule. So 30 of the employers actually would have not provided with the means to even book time with them. So that was an interesting one. But so again, if you're kind of an employer listening to this and you're thinking, what can I do this year? Particularly if you're graduating, running a virtual fair on handshake. The number one thing you should take away from this is if you're using handshake and you're attending a virtual graduate fair, make sure that you publish your schedule on time so you give students the opportunity to come and talk to you.

Do you think? Not every employer, of course, but I think a lot of employers have an attitude as to, well, we don't have to work terribly hard, we don't have to have the schedule published too far in advance because graduates should be delighted to have an opportunity to talk to employer like us in the current climate. I think there's a sense of that out there.

Yes and no. We speak to hundreds of employers and while certain big brands, like big four big financial institutions, big tech companies, while they're by no means short of, of applicants, they are short of the right applicants. So everyone is getting in fact the number. As you know, this is kind of true for the entire industry. The number of inbound applications has actually increased by twofold. Right. Or something like this. But the number of relevant candidates has probably gone down quite significantly. Right. So employers, yes, you know, they can take that stance and say yes, you know, we can just kind of sit back and see who applies. But if anything, this is creating more work for yourself and it's not meeting certain objectives. Everyone, everyone has DNI high on their agendas this year and if you just rely on people applying directly, you're most definitely not going to meet those, those objectives.

I was listening to a great podcast last week, I think it was Harvard Business School, and I was interviewing a fantastic woman who's 24 years of age or 23 years of age, and she runs her own marketing consultancy around advising brands on her generation, the infamous Gen Z. And you know, the TikTok generation or whatever you might call the generation and includes that demographic you're talking about, the agent 24 and you ignoring the, you know, from experience, having gone through the whole, I'm a Gen X who had to analyze Gen Y and they were on Gen Z and you kind of go, hang on a second half of the difference that each generation perceives they have, they don't have. They just, every generation thinks they're very different from the, from the generation because they want to differentiate themselves.

Yeah.

As you get older, you realize there's a lot more similarities than you expect. But there are unique things and it comes from, you know, the generation of your, of your, your parents, what they went through impacts how they treat you. And then the environment you grew up with and the economy. There are, there are absolute patterns there. And you know, Gen Z, I think are, are least understood by perhaps employers, particularly the Xers and boomers. Right. I know this analyst, she was saying that all of us are called boomers to them because you might as well all be just. There's a group of people who don't understand them. They don't differentiate an X or Y or boomers. You're boomers. Like it's just, you're not also there for your boomers. Therefore, yeah, you know, you don't get us and attention spans. But also some of the interesting things, just the consumption of video, the consumption of streaming services, the amount of time spent online and with devices, the expectation of that, the trust piece that goes in there, privacy, multiple different profiles, how you represent yourself, you know, very interesting generation if you're to believe some of these patterns. You know, have you seen, do you have insight into how this generation, you know, this gen Z generation, 1824 demographic that are, that mainly make up the early career population. Not exclusively, of course, but mainly how they perceive this new world of work. Again, we call it the new world of work. A Gen X gen wire or a boomer. But is there a perception that, you know, this generation is just much more ready for this world that they might go into, whether they're being doing an internship, are going to go work permanently in this market.

Yeah, yeah, it's great, great question. And I don't know whether I should feel offended that we all kind of being put in the same bucket here, Johnny. But all boomers. Yeah, all boomers.

Nothing wrong with boomers, just to be clear. But we're all boomers, apparently.

You know, it's really interesting what you mentioned about, you know, I, I think you, you're right. You know, I think every generation tends to look at the previous generation, say, oh, you know, we're very different. But I think there's something quite unique about this generation. Whatever you want to call them, Z, I don't know what the right label is anymore, but if you think about it, they're truly the very first generation to actually grow up with a mobile device in their hand. They've had like the world to their fingertips and I think this is reflected on how they think about work as a whole. So we keep on engaging the community on a regular basis. And again, we started kind of trying to get the pulse of the student body as early as March, when we were kind of February actually when we kind of thinking, should we go into lockdown here, should we not? You know, we started surveying the, the network over in the US and one of the things that I thought was quite fascinating, we asked students whether they are ready and willing to work remotely, should, should we not be able to return back to, to normal, whatever that means now. And what came back was quite fascinating. So 80, 84% of students who took the survey said that they would be more than happy to consider remote job and internship, which I thought the numbers would be quite significantly lower. And what's more, 75% of those students actually said that not only they would consider, but they actually are able to do a remote job or internship from home. So I do think there are a lot of similarities, but this particular thing really stood out for me in terms of them being happy and able to do virtual internships and full time virtual work as well.

I think, you know, if you look at some of the other alleged trends of this generation, you know, one, one, apart from being mobile first, which I think is really important, I think another is that this is a generation that, you know, I read a stat that said that more a higher percentage of Gen Z aspire to be a YouTuber than an athlete, which is the first generation ever to us, you know, because you know, most kids certainly of, of non Z's, call us all boomers. You know, you'd have a certain percentage, you wanted to be football stars or tennis stars or golf stars or whatever, whatever your fancy was not for everyone, but a large percentage, there's a much bigger percentage who want to be professional youtubers or Instagram or Tiktokers. And you know, one of the impacts of that is that there's a culture in this generation. I see it with my, my, my 12 year old, my eldest, right, where there's an aspiration that you're gonna have multiple sources of income. There's like, I can make money through sponsorship, I can have ads in my YouTube channel, I can do this, I can broadcast. There's so many more broadcasters. But that I think lends itself to somebody who kind of sees themselves as not like I, I don't think my son, my other son has any aspirations. Just work for one employer like that. To him it's mental. I think that's a, that is a more common thing in Gen Zs and I think that therefore this whole, the remote working is more interesting. Because you know, it doesn't surprise me those stats because if you're coming out of university and you have grown up mobile first and you're in that generation and you've been a broadcaster, a creator of content because so many are creators of content because that's just more what that generation has done because they've had the tools and the access to that. It's more likely that you're kind of going, I'm going to hedge my bets. I'm going to have maybe a few different sources of income, maybe a primary job and this other thing and this other thing on the side. It does make more sense not to be confined to an office space and working hours. You have to commit to. I think there's a massive opportunity with that generation. And you know, I think it's maybe, maybe they're right. Calling is all boomers, right? Maybe it's, it's, it is the other generations are kind of going oh, it's going to be so hard to kind of hire them, onboard them, manage them and maybe, maybe the already career challenge sitting there going like, dude, this is, this is going to be, this is.

Not a big thing. Yeah, yeah, I think you're spot on. And he almost kind of makes you rethink the whole thing. And again, it shows that early talent is not only willing but fully enabled to take those opportunities. And it's actually us as employers. It's on us to provide them with the opportunity, ensure that we can actually give them a shot in this kind of crazy time. Having said that, one interesting piece of data that I want to share with you in terms of how Covid has affected this sort of demographic, nine in 10 students have reported that Covid has negatively affected their mental health, which I thought was quite interesting. So while, you know, everyone is happy to take a virtual, you know, internship or graduate program, et cetera, you know, the pandemic has affected everyone's mental health in ways unprecedented. So that's that I think it's actually worth talking about, as well as the fact that, you know, there's something else that, you know, stood out when we were kind of doing these research pieces, which was, you know, talking about mental health, that, you know, a good third of all the participants in the survey that we run reported a constant fear of not being able to find work after graduation and then thereafter. And that has actually led to another very interesting kind of trend, which is even in the UK is prioritizing income generation rather than kind of doing other things. Obviously, you cannot even take a gap here and go traveling. None of those things are possible now. But kind of where this really manifests itself in tangible ways is kind of looking at the number of students who are willing to take a job in the gig economy upon graduation, before and after Covid, and that number has increased from 54% to 70%. So this, I thought, was quite telling as to, you know, what is happening in gradual sense right now.

Yeah, it makes a whole lot of sense. I think, you know, you've hit an excellent point. That mental health issue, you know, all of the data, in every country I've seen, the data being produced shows that certain. Certain demographics are just more susceptible to the strains of this. And I look at myself, right? My situation, you know, early 40s, family. I have my. Largely my social network, and I have. I have the people I rely on. And therefore, you know, not being able to go out and socialize as much. Of course it's an inconvenience and it's annoying for all of us, but it's not the end of the world. I still have that close network, but the network I have, I built when I was in that age demographic.

Yeah.

And that is. That is massively important. Like, they are being starved of the ability to go build that demographic. Like, I wouldn't have made the friendships I've made in university online, I think, because things I got involved in, I would have made different friends of course. Right, yeah, but, but you know, all those experiences, they are really important and I touched on the first article we read that the, the, the woman from, from Ding who's ex Facebook and she talked about the missing experiences, the, you know, boozy nights, the, the events you get involved in organizing together, whether it's dram soccer, whether it's, you know, whatever you're doing in university, it's not quite the same. It's going to be different. Right. I think it's not to say there won't be anything. Right. I think that that's naive to say there isn't any some virtual equivalent. But I get, I get, I guess that stress We've Aaron Lince, by the way, commenting live here saying if they're worried about finding work, but 30% are no shows for hiring events, they have to learn until you show up. It's a really good point. Right. But you know Aaron, it is the, the irony where you have massive stress about not having income and not work. Then people don't show up for, for, for career events they've booked into. But that taps into. And we talked about this dementor before, you know, there's sometimes the, the process can be just, you know, again, mobile, first generation, digital first know everything about, about that kind of experience. If the experience isn't instant, fast, you know, things like virtual queues, you'll lose people. And it may seem kind of counterintuitive because you can go, but you know, these people need a job. What are you doing? Yeah, but it's kind of like there's zero tolerance for poor experiences, slow experiences, lag and apps, how they work, too many steps in a process, zero tolerance and the whole, well, you need a job, they kind of go well. As we started our first point with the K shaped recovery, a lot of them don't like a lot of them are still in massive demand. Computer science grads, engineering grads, etc. You know, no problem finding jobs, so don't be worrying about it. Others. Yes, but even then, you know, it's ingrained in you not to tolerate these experiences. So, you know, although you need a job, it's probably not. The weight of the importance of that is probably still not there for you. And maybe you, you're still living at home so you can live with no income. You know, you can, someone will support you. You know, don't. I don't assume that just because someone's in a demographic whereby, let's say their undergraduate degree or postgraduate degree is not in such demand that they will therefore jump at any opportunity present in front of them and tolerate, therefore, a poor experience. They won't. I think that's what the data says.

Yeah. And it's interesting if you look back at that stat I shared earlier around employers not putting up schedules. You know, this goes both ways. Right. We kind of spoke about the negative implications around this of, you know, those employers who don't publish their schedule, allow students to book a time with them and interact, they miss out. But there's a certain number of employers who would actually put up their schedule and that would result in them getting even more people talking to them. So it kind of goes both ways. It's not just. Again, I was quick to judge as well. And when I first look at the number, the conversion from a registration to a session booked being about 50%, I was quick to say, oh, students fault. Right. But actually it goes both ways.

It does. And I think it's for those of us maybe don't work in the early career space every day or don't do a whole lot of recruiting. I find it fascinating because it's a window into what our professional hiring world will look like in five years. You know, this is the audience, these are the, this is the audience in five, 10 years we've got to cater for in our professional hiring or three years maybe. Right. Because the expectation won't change. They won't just all of a sudden get used to the way we hire elsewhere. If I'm hired in a certain way for my first job job, I'll expect probably an advanced version of that for my next couple of jobs. So I think you're going to see, hopefully the innovation that we'll see in early career hiring will begin to go up into professional hiring rather than the other way around. You mentioned at the start of the show Dimitar, that, you know, sourcing isn't something that was ever done in early career hiring. And in your view, perhaps because you couldn't and then, you know, networks like Handshake and others potentially can give you the ability to source. So maybe we'll see sourcing in the early career space so going that way. But I think there's an opportunity for it to go the other way, which is, you know, you look at the, the, the, the, the talent branding and making people aware of opportunities. You know, we're trying to do that in the early career space very fast because it was so analog. Hopefully that will then give us, you know, innovative solutions that we can apply to, to perhaps, you know, volume hiring. Our targeted hiring in the professional space, I think it's. There's always something to learn from, from the two different spaces. What is your. What is your kind of, you know, you fast forward what direction? Where do you see early career hiring going? What would your aspirations for some of the processes, what would they be in. In a world where we're not talking about, whilst there's a pandemic, we've moved on and we're kind of just into normal routine, I won't say go backwards because that's never going to happen. What are your hopes and aspirations for early career hiring as we go forward?

I think a lot of the shifts that I described earlier are here to stay. So again, to me, I've been scratching my head. I'm sure you as well. Why have we not actually moved the entire talent identification process online already? It's just way more efficient. It allows you to leverage resources, find the right candidates, solve all the problems around unqualified candidates and sort of the things around dni. So I think again, Covid has actually served as a catalyst for that process to be sped up and is here to stay. The other one, which I think we'll see parts of, is the engagement piece I spoke about. So again, I mentioned earlier in the show, my very first startup, we built an asynchronous video interviewing application 12 years ago, which was ridiculous because way ahead of time, but I think there's merit for that type of technology as well. And you know, one of the things I mentioned in terms of stats on the network, the numbers, a number of video interviews that we saw on handshake increased 200, sorry, 2,500% from March to April. I think this is a trend that is here to stay as well. We're going to probably see less in terms of, if you think of the assessment piece, less in person assessment and interactions. But they're not going to go away, that's for sure. So what are my aspirations? I guess to make the whole process way more efficient. This was the reason why I really wanted to join Handshake as well. I do remember still my graduate experience 15 years ago and being constantly frustrated around how inefficient it was. So again, what do you hope to see coming out of this? A slicker, more efficient recruitment process that allow graduates to have more opportunities available to them. And I'm not sure if I just lost you here.

I'm back. That's the first time that's happened.

There you go. I wasn't even sure if I was talking to myself anymore. I was like.

Exactly. I 100 agree with everything you just said. It was fascinating, although I didn't get to hear it for the last three minutes. So apologies for that. Thankfully that that day. I apologize for introduction interruption for everyone. I want to thank you for, for coming up the show. But before you go, what I'd hope, as we do with every guest, we ask every guest to share perhaps their piece of advice that either they have been given in their career that they want to share with our audience or they wish to share from themselves that you would leave our audience with today. So what is that one piece of advice you'd like to share today?

It's an interesting one. You know, you asked me this in advance and I kind of kept on scratching my head thinking what it would be. It's one that could sound quite corny, but someone told me this while I was still at university. I think I was in my final year. And it was the people by people. And it kind of connects to what you were saying earlier around kind of building your network and building the most meaningful friendships and whether this is business partnerships or friendships in your personal life and perhaps graduates being deprived of that opportunity right now, but kind of realizing that people do buy people. And a lot of I've had this conversation with Bill Borman, a good friend of ours, who used to say that when people say business is not personal, they don't know what they're talking about. And I do believe this. Everything is personal, whether you realize it or not. The second you realize that people do buy people, whether this is metaphorically speaking or not quite in real terms, but in the business context of a business transaction, it's something that I think would really propel your career and in your personal life.

I love it. Everything is personal.

Yeah.

It's just business is, is not true. People do buy people. It's great advice. It's what I've always experienced. Thank you. The same. Demetra, it's been fantastic talking to you. I really enjoyed this show. Really enjoyed getting some insights from.

Likewise.

Yeah, a treasure trove insights. I'm looking forward to seeing more of what Handshake are doing across Europe, Middle east and Africa over the coming years under your stewardship. Stewardship.

Amazing.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having again told. And we have a great show coming up next week with another fantastic guest. I'm really excited about it. Our next week's guest as she's somebody who has recently kind of come on board our platform as a guest speaker and she's just blown me away and blowing our users away with her fantastic insights on how to write job postings that work. There's the Wonderful Katrina Kibben, CEO and founder of 3 Years Media, a professional copywriter who brings her no nonsense, no bullshit approach to how to write job postings that really work. She's going to join us next week. That's Wednesday 4th of November. That's 4pm GMT, which is after the clocks change in the US back to 11am in East Coast US and that is 8am West coast and that is back to 11pm Singapore time. So she's gonna be joining us live in the show. But don't forget, you'll be able to hear on your favorite podcast medium on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts and get some really brilliant insights from a professional copywriter, one of the best in our business on how to write job ads. And she'll teach you the difference. Job ads, job posts, job top specs, all of these things and just dropping. Tons of brilliant advice and lots of humor, honesty and sensibility. So make sure to join us next week. Put that in your diary, check it out on your walk on your podcast or check us out live. Meantime, I thank you all for joining us on the show. I thank Aaron for his live comments as well. And most of all, I can't dimiture for sharing those fantastic insights from Handshake. We'll be more with great we'll be back with more great insights and more great learning next week.

Sam.