Employers Increasingly Target Community Colleges : Phones Ringing for Student Job Seekers

The phones ring constantly at Orange Coast College’s Job Placement Center. Companies wishing to post job openings on the Costa Mesa community college center’s bulletin board and students asking about them keep center director Mary Martin’s staff of eight busy all year long.

And one week each year, edgy interviewees in dresses and three-piece suits nervously enter the center to meet with employer representatives during the college’s On-Campus Recruitment Week.

The scenario is repeated all over the state as recruiters in search of entry-level workers converge in growing numbers on California’s community colleges.

While four-year colleges and universities still take the brunt of employers’ recruiting efforts, community colleges increasingly are being targeted.

One reason is that many community college students are older than their four-year college counterparts. And many are women who have gone back to school. Employers, said Saddleback College placement specialist Linda Moy, seek those people out. “They’re typically in high demand,” she said. “They’ve got a high attitude, and they’re reliable and dependable.”

Job Placement Programs

Martin said that as recruiters show up on campus, more and more community college students are taking advantage of job-placement programs, particularly an increasing number of what she called re-entry students. Most are women, especially “displaced homemakers” who must learn to support themselves after divorce or the death of their husbands, Martin said. The number, she added, is growing by “leaps and bounds.”

With the influx of students looking into job-placement services, many recruiters consider the community college job market a gold mine.

Employers and campus placement specialists at a number of community colleges in Orange County said that most of the student interviewees are looking for jobs, though some go through the program simply to ask about the company for their own information and others are trying out their job interview skills after learning and practicing them in center-sponsored workshops and videotaped “mock interviews.”

Martin declined to rate job recruitment success at her campus, saying that what matters is that the student learns from the experience. “They don’t know what it’s like outside in the industry, in the real world,” she said. “This is a learning process; They’re learning how to dress appropriately, how to write a resume, how to conduct themselves.” On-campus recruitment also helps the student relax during an interview by setting the meeting on the student’s own turf.

Valerie Gossman, director of human relations for the Newport Beach Marriott, said it is primarily for that reason that she plans on an initial 15-minute screening of the applicant on campus before following up with interviews at the hotel offices.

This year, about 50 students signed up to participate in the Orange Coast interviews, which were conducted by representatives of eight companies, including the Newport Beach Marriott and Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Newport Beach. The jobs offered varied from sales representatives to tennis instructors.

On Tuesday of the interview week, held earlier this month, Gossman and another Marriott representative screened 20 students--most of whom sought part-time jobs in food service or other service-related fields--at the OCC center. Many of the applicants Marriott sees are students in a hotel and food management program who want to get their feet in the door in that field. “Students think: ‘If I’m going to be waiting on tables, why do it at a restaurant when I could get a job at a hotel?’ ” Gossman explained.

One advantage of hiring from the community college level is that it enables the employer to groom employees to fit the firm’s own mold, according to Tom Battaglia, corporate employee coordinator for Pacific Mutual. The company, California’s largest mutual life insurance firm, recruits entry-level employees in the clerical and technical areas at OCC and other local two-year colleges.

Battaglia pointed out that two-year colleges furnish the basic skills Pacific Mutual wants to see in those applying for secretarial and computer-related jobs. Most of the positions offered to community college students require an associate of arts degree, he said, although training is available for some positions.

Battaglia, who also is a member of the California Community College Placement Assn., said that Pacific Mutual has recruited at the two-year college level for years and that he has seen more and more employers reaching out to that particular market recently. “We realize that we need to reach into the backyard of our community and pull forth that talent,” he said, adding that recruiting trips to the community colleges have been more effective than help-wanted ads in finding employees.

‘Springboard Jobs’

While some jobs offered by recruiters are for pocket money and not related to a student’s long-term career interest, most are “springboard” positions. And some don’t require any degree at all, said Martin, OCC’s placement director.

But even for those applicants who have degrees or are working toward them, graduation from college doesn’t guarantee a good-paying job. “We have to make students understand . . . (that) most of these positions are entry-level, learning positions,” Martin said.

But community college graduates can use their diplomas to secure career positions, said Betty Desmond, placement director at Golden West College.