Google ranked first—for the fourth time in a row—in the 2013 Fortune Top 100 Best Companies to Work For. Not only does the organization have a great reputation, but also their office spaces have featured in numerous magazines. Google's corporate lifestyle complements the organization and is made available to its staff. In fact, during their recruitment process, Google puts together a committee made up of existing employees, who check out the new potential hires on Google Hangout. What better way to be interviewed for a job with Google than by having a bunch of Googlers taking you through a series of interviews and testing your technical skills as well as checking how you think through a problem?

Google has a clear idea of the type of person that will thrive in their environment, so they will specifically look for them. When you first apply for a position, the recruitment team will contact you in order to provide you with more information on the role. Then, the person who works in a similar role will take you through a screening to find out more about you and what your expectations are in relation to the role and the organization. These initial steps are often carried out over the phone. Once you're invited to attend an interview at a Google office, expect to have five interviews in a day with some practical tasks related to your area of specialization. The main purpose of these interviews is to find out what you're passionate about in relation to technology and to determine your problem solving ability. When the group of interviewers recommends that you should be hired, feedback is given relatively quickly. However, you should expect anywhere between four and nine interviews; this is a reduction down from 12 to 14 interviews in some cases, or even as many as 29 interviews before getting hired. Before offering you the post, a number of decision making committees jump into action.

What attracts IT graduates to Google is its reputation for being a people-centered organization, where passion for innovation is blended with development opportunities, career growth, top-end design workspaces created to encourage creativity and collaboration, and its widely renowned benefits, from onsite massage to games rooms, sports arenas, onsite crèche facilities, and the list goes on.

Another great company to work for is Facebook. Even though the company didn't make it into the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2013, it maintains its meritocratic approach to hiring, which you may have seen in the movie "The Social Network" or in the book with the same title. The first technical employees earned their position by winning a coding competition, also known in the industry as a hack-a-thon or hack-fest. The competition element has remained within the recruitment process, and the starting point of the process is very similar to that of Google; an initial telephone screening interview with a recruiter, then with someone more role-specific. Once candidates are invited to the headquarters, they are required to take coding tests that include the more challenging end of coding languages. Hack-fests still take place and Facebook will now award winners with at least a telephone interview.

If we look at the top 10 of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, we will find names of companies that may not be well known for their hiring practices or innovative benefits, but are worth checking out all the same because of their behavioral style interviewing techniques, which still work and set them apart as great companies to work for. Number two on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For is SAS, number six is Netapp, and number nine is Ultimate Software.

While no original-style recruitment processes drive the other top 10 contenders, what they do have in common is a people-centered approach to structuring the organization. They have well-being and development of staff as core mottos. Original staff benefits range from onsite gyms, indoor basketball courts, ice cream trucks, and organic farms, to various perks such as health care and free holidays. But the glue that holds the companies together seems to be a solid value-driven approach to business and people. They not only want to hire the best, but also want to retain the best, and they actively work at creating a positive workplace culture.

Another organization worth highlighting is Salesforce.com because of their innovative use of social media to attract IT graduates. Salesforce.com posts jobs and job-search-related information under the Twitter hashtag #dreamjob, which they completely dominate even though it isn't a proprietary term. The company exploits all kinds of social networks such as their YouTube channel, where you can see several clips of staff testimonials; you can go back to their dream force conference and review various client case studies and create an online appreciation for the company, its senior managers, and their clients.

Your organization's online presence will make a difference to the way candidates perceive your company, and the old template static website is definitely a thing of the past, when job advertisements featured in newspapers and "snail" mail were the only application processes. Nowadays, you see career pages on most company websites, with the inclusion of various video clips featuring employees and their career paths, company culture, and value statements. Often, the career page is the entry point for a candidate application through an automated database system.

Today's candidates are web-savvy and their searches will go further than your own career pages. Social media is a vast resource and will often tell the other side of the corporate story. Being in a high position on best workplace lists is a great endorsement, because it immediately gives further validation to your employer's brand as well as providing listings on external websites, which in turn increases your Google ranking, and researching hires will find this information at the click of a button.

Social media in recruitment is definitely here to stay. While a few years ago job boards such as Monster were all the rage, their domination of that market is being eroded by the professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and the Facebook collaboration BeKnown. However, LinkedIn is definitely the place to be for professional connections and knowledge-sharing on companies and products, as well as research on candidates through their profiles, recommendations, and network of connections. A few organizations utilize the power of LinkedIn groups and company pages fully, and often recruiters will not systematically research potential new hires in this environment.

With current unemployment rates at a high and governments offering incentives to take on apprentices, the IT industry has also started to actively seek out potential trainees. Some companies, such as EMC for example, give candidates the opportunity to explore various teams through a number of projects with backing of additional training, so the apprentice or trainee will come out with a new range of skills, and in quite a few situations, a potential job offer.

At a recent learning and development exhibition, I spoke to the founders of Inspiring Interns, who said that their demand for IT interns was higher than their supply. What they saw happening in the marketplace was that banks and other financial institutions could offer higher starting salaries, which is what's attracting a good percentage of the top talent pool of IT graduates.

When you look at the organizations that attract top IT talent, they not only offer a reasonable salary, but they also offer a great package, which includes benefits, culture, and a place that people want to belong to and where they can learn throughout their career. For the purpose of this book, we will zone into "how to" questions so your organization can also excel at some of the techniques used by those that are already successful at attracting graduates in their droves.

But before we launch into how you can replicate these techniques, let's examine what it is that current IT graduates, and in particular the Millennials, also known as Generation Y (born between 1977 and 1997), want from their future employers.

Chapter 1, What Do IT Graduates Want?, gives an insight into some of the key behaviors and deciders of the generation of graduates that are currently joining the workforce in high numbers globally. In this chapter, you will learn:

Chapter 2, Be Clear on What Your Organization Has to Offer, shows you how to put your best foot forward in promoting an organization to IT graduates, by creating unique selling points, describing the elements of the package you are presenting to the candidate, and creating the ultimate role description.

Chapter 3, Creativity Rules in Gaining Graduate Interest, shows you how to put your best foot forward in promoting an organization to IT graduates.

Chapter 4, Getting to "You're Hired", takes you from the application all the way through to the first few days on the job for your new recruit. The key topics you will learn in this chapter are as follows:

This book is aimed at hiring managers and recruiters in smaller businesses, which may not have a full HR team or would like to explore creative techniques to recruit the right IT graduates to their business.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

New terms and important words are shown in bold.

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