Internships and co-op programs
One approach to gaining access to young, intelligent, and pre-screened talent is to work with select undergraduate and graduate-level universities to hire undergraduate and graduate-level students on internships and co-op programs. This approach enables the students to work on varied and challenging real-world problems and situations, and you and your team have an opportunity to "interview" these prospective employees over multiple months.
An important aspect of this approach is to assign the interns and co-op participants work that is important to the business and that has the possibility to change the way business is executed. Giving the students "busy" work is a waste of everyone's time and energy. You must be ready for you and your team members to mentor and manage the young team members. You must also be ready for projects to fail, but to learn from those failures, and you must be ready for projects to succeed and that...