If you wrapped up fall recruiting and dove headfirst into planning for spring, you may have inadvertently overlooked a large portion of high potential candidates: winter graduates.

While campus recruitment tends to focus on academic calendars, winter recruiting is an undervalued time to get ahead on attracting, assessing, and hiring qualified candidates. According to ERE, more than one-third of college students graduate at the end of fall semester—equating to roughly 1.3 million graduates who are ready to launch their careers. In addition, winter months tend to see fewer job postings compared to other months, translating to less competition for growing teams. There's no need to wait six months or more for them to start, allowing your company to get a head start on achieving its business goals or address any new-year employee turnover.

How to Engage Winter Graduates

Though most internship programs run over the summer months, adopting a year-round intern approach can help you engage, assess, and hire winter graduates. Here’s why Micro-Internships are a competitive recruiting advantage during winter in particular:

• Winter graduates have more downtime after graduation and during the holidays, while hiring managers are often overwhelmed with both finishing out one year and launching into a new one. This provides many opportunities for short-term projects that can be used to assess for core skills needed to succeed in the position. In addition, now is the time to engage spring graduates before the semester begins.
  
  
• While many college students are interested in returning home upon graduation, the current pandemic has accelerated this desire for career opportunities that bring them closer to family. If you’re recruiting for an organization that’s not located near a college, now is the time to generate awareness of your entry-level roles through Micro-Internships. These short-term projects help graduates explore careers they may not have considered or known existed, they can also demonstrate the skills they learned while earning their degree.
  
  
• With fewer organizations targeting fall graduates, winter recruiting can help you stand out and gain the attention of students with plentiful free time. Use Micro-Internships to keep graduates engaged over the next few months if their start date isn’t until summer. These new hires will feel like they’re already part of the team—even before their first day.