Graduate Recruitment Blog

The AAGE being their usual helpful selves released the 2011 Careers Fair Schedule last week. This is only my 3rd year on the Grad recruitment campaign trail coming up but so far each year has brought different formats in terms of the schedule the fairs are held within.

The 2011 Careers Fair Schedule

The easiest way to list out the schedule is chronologically grouped by state so here we go:

Victoria

• Monday 7^th March – The Big Meet Melbourne
• Tuesday 8^th March – Victoria University
• Wednesday 9^th March – University of Melbourne
• Thursday 10^th March – RMIT
• Tuesday 15^th March – La Trobe University
• Wednesday 16^th March – Swinburne University
• Thursday 17^th March – Monash University
• Friday 18^th March – Ballarat
• Monday 21^st March – Deakin University

NSW

• 3^rd March Macquarie University
• Friday 11^th March – The Big Meet Sydney
• Monday 14^th March – University of Sydney
• Friday 8^th April – Unviersity of Wollongong
• Monday 11^th April – UTS
• Tuesday 12^th April – UWS (Engineering & IT)
• Wednesday 13^th April – UNSW
• Friday 15^th April – UWS
• Monday 18^th April – Newcastle

South Australia

• Tuesday 22^nd March – Uni SA
• Wednesday 23^rd March – Flinders University (Science, Engineering)
• Wednesday 23^rd March – Uni of Adelaide (Business & Arts)
• Thursday 24^th March – Flinders University (Law)
• Thursday 24^th March – Uni of Adelaide (Science & IT)

Western Australia

• Tuesday 22^nd March – The Big Meet Perth
• Wednesday 23^rd March – Curtin University
• Thursday 7^th April – Murdoch University

Queensland

• Tuesday 22^nd March – Central Queensland University
• Thursday 24^th March – Sunshine Coast
• Friday 25^th March – University of Southern Queensland
• Monday 28^th March – QUT
• Tuesday 29^th March – Griffith (Nathan Campus)
• Wednesday 30^th March – Univeristy of Queensland
• Thursday 31^st March – Griffith (Gold Coast)
• Thursday 31^st March – Bond University
• Tuesday 5^th April – James Cook University (Townsville)
• Wednesday 6^th April – James Cook University (Cairns)
• Northern Territory
• Wednesday 30^th March – Charles Darwin University

Tasmania

• Friday 11^th March – University of Tasmania

ACT

• Friday 25^th March – Tertiary to Work(ANU, UC, ACU)

Links to the downloadable PDF versions of the careers fair timetable can be found on the AAGE site here: http://www.aage.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63&Itemid=71

Major Changes

Length of the Season

The biggest change to the schedule that you can see is the length of the season which is around 2 weeks longer than it was this year in 2010 with the last careers fair finishing on the 18^th of April. This is going to mean a very long travelling period for employers who do go to the majority of these events or else the alternative which is to cut back on the numbers of fairs attended to avoid 6 – 7 weeks out of the office and on the road.

From reviewing the application close dates from a number of our client campaigns this year, many employers will have closed their application period before 5 of the larger NSW universities have even held their careers fairs. It is worth noting that all of the AAGE organised Big Meet fairs fall in March which may help to get in front of some of the graduates you may not be able to see due to the late dates of other NSW universities specifically.

NSW Fair Timeline Spread

NSW fairs start on the 3^rd of March with Macquarie University, then the next NSW fairs are held in Mid March with The Big Meet Sydney & University of Sydney. The next NSW fairs are between the 8^th and 18^th of April. This makes attending the NSW based fairs a close to 7 week exercise so it will be interesting to see how this impacts in terms of employer attendances.

Easter

Easter is a lot later on in the year for 2011 compared to 2010 which was very early in April. In 2011 it is very late in April. We have noticed that the Easter break is a major trigger of job hunting activity for graduates in Australia due to a large academic workload in the run up to the Uni Easter Break. It may be worth taking this into account if you are able to have any flexibility around your application opening dates to be able to receive applications at that time of the year.

The Verdict

All in all, this is the 3^rd schedule that I’ve seen in my 3 seasons in the industry so far and each year the schedule has been vastly different than the last. The AAGE report on careers fair attendances has recently been released and it is interesting to see that overall, more organisations are attending these fairs, however attendances as a whole were lower in 2010 compared to 2009 so this longer schedule for 2011 will change these numbers again I think and we’ll be keeping a close eye on the next report to see how this scheduling format has impacted attendances by employers.

I recently attended the AAGE Grad Panel up in Brisbane. This was the second AAGE Grad Panel that I’ve been to, the last being in 2009 in Sydney.

If you haven’t been to a Grad Panel, the basic concept is that 4 – 5 different employers bring along one of their recently hired graduates and the mix of recruiters in the audience are able to ask them questions about a variety of subjects

The Grads

The last Grad Panel I attended in Sydney had a mix of graduates from different backgrounds such as marketing, Information Technology, engineering and human resources. In Brisbane however, three out of the four graduates on the panel were engineers.

So our panel consisted of:

• Reannan from Aecom – Civil Engineering
• Tegan from the Brisbane City Council – Town Planning
• Chris from the Department of Transport and Main Roads – Civil Engineering
• Rubi from GHD – Mechanical Engineering

So we can see, engineering, infrastructure and construction are a definite focus for graduate employers in Queensland.

Vacation Work

All of the graduates on the panel had managed to secure some form of cadetship, scholarship or vacation work program while they were studying.

The 3 grads on the scholarship and vacation programs were not bonded by their employers to become fulltime employees after their programs were over. The grad on the cadetship program however was bonded for a set time period to take a full time position with the organisation.

Even with no lock in period, 2 of the 3 scholarship and vacation students took full time employment with their respective companies after their under grad programs had finished. The main reason they stayed on at these employers was that the areas they wanted to continue working on were available to them as a full time employee. The grad that changed from their vacation employer to a different full time employer stated that the work available to them at their vacation employer was not what they really wanted to do long term which motivated them to move on.

So it seems that these under graduate programs are working really well in the engineering sector and it does help that these vacation programs do make up part of the curriculum in many engineering degrees. These initiatives do have potential to be more widespread in other areas with skills shortages such as Information Technology specifically.

Application Numbers

The number of applications seems to vary wildly. One grad applied for a single position and nailed it while the other grads on the panel applied for anywhere between 8 – 15 positions. The grads who were at universities that included practical work experience as part of their degree were prompted to apply due to notifications from many of their lecturers.

What attracted them?

There were a range of employer attributes that the graduates placed value in. The major recurring theme was Company Reputation which was defined as how the organisation was perceived publicly as well as the experiences that their friends may have had on previous vacation programs.

Other key factors that they were attracted to were things like work life balance, specifically where there were planned social events and social groups that they were made aware of.

The prospect of having access to training programs as well as other learning and development programs were attractive however the exact specifics. Another major plus point was the future opportunities aligning to their specific interests and career goals.

Their expectations versus reality

Always a dangerous question to ask some new employees with their grad managers in the room listening. The common trends in this space were the massive differences between university life and the professional work place. Vacation work and scholarship programs did help to bridge the gap in this area though with a more gradual transition between uni and full time work meaning they knew what they were in for when they started full time. Starting at the same time as other grads did really help as well as they had an instant network.

Structured Grad Alumni Programs

This was a question from the floor around whether they thought that running a structured alumni program for the graduates would be a good initiative. All of the grads unanimously thought that this would be a bit cumbersome to manage and would not really work out in reality. The grads had already built informal alumni programs per se by inviting previous years graduates to their social events which seemed to be working well already.

Hopefully this post will help all of the recruiters out there currently working on Vacation and Internship recruitment hang in there as this does seem to be a very effective way of hiring new talent into organisations. Also a big thanks goes out to Jane at Main Roads who organised and hosted the session for inviting me along!

Well it has been nearly a year since I put out my first post for Grad Managers on how to get started on Twitter. Since then quite a bit has changed in the industry, with some of my favourite tweeters leaving the industry and many new ones rolling in. So this post is more than overdue!

If you are new to twitter, or are looking for people to follow in the Australian graduate industry then make sure you follow…

Ainsley Gilkes – @ainsleygilkes

Ainsley is one of the committee members of the AAGE, and is also responsible for OneSteels graduate social media strategy. She is a great person for ideas on how to attract graduates through online attraction strategies including twitter and facebook.

Adam Shay – @shayads

Adam is the managing director of the Face, one of the leading employment brand agencies in areas such as online innovation and online employer brand promotion.

David Talamelli – @DavidTalamelli

Dave is the principal recruiter at Oracle, and despite the fact that he doesn’t think Vince Vaughan is a good comedian he regularly blogs about the industry and tweets thought provoking info.

Jessica Booth – @jessicabooth

Jess is an HR manager at Wotton Kearney. She has been one of the closest and warmest people we have met in HR via twitter. She won the HR Rising star AHRI award in 2009 for her continued innovation in the HR industry especially in Online. Jess is  a great person to get to know when it comes to communicating to graduates in the digital space.

Dan Nuroo – @dannuroo

Dan is the recruitment manager at DWS consulting. He is an expert on attracting graduates especially in the IT space and has a lot of useful insights into the graduate market. A must follow.

Hayley Warne – @hlwarne

Hayley is the graduate recruitment manager at Pitcher Partners, and a thought leader in online graduate attraction. She has just come off a very successful marathon Q&A on our forums you can see the post here!

Kelly O’Shaughnessy – @koshaughnessy

Kelly was previously the graduate recruitment manager at St George and is now working that Peerlo; one of the most innovative recruitment companies in Australia. Kelly is very clued up in graduate recruitment via social media and all round great value in your twitter feed.

Paul Jacobs – @pauljacobs4real

Another person we met on twitter and a fellow kiwi which makes him awesome. Paul creates and manages facebook pages for graduate recruitment in New Zealand. His work has won awards so make sure you have a chat to him on twitter if you are thinking of doing your own thing.

Jared Woods – @jaredw78

Jared was previously the head of employer brand at SKM consulting. He is a great person to follow if you are interested in improving employer brand for your graduate recruitment intake. He is in Melbourne and loves a good cocktail if you are ever looking for some free advice!

Sam Walton – @manthaukinoz

Sam is the grad recruitment manager for Deloitte NSW. She is great value and has a lot of really good insights into how to run campus related events for your graduate recruitment drive. Always out there talking to students with previous experience in Career coaching back in the UK. Its great to hear what Deloitte gets up to on Campus via her tweets.

Victoria is head of employer brand at Deloitte. She is also based in Sydney and a great person to follow with regards to employer brand development, especially when it comes to graduates. You can follow her formal twitter account that she manages for Deloitte too! If you are thinking of starting a twitter account for your program or corporate brand, then make sure you follow her!

Josh MacKenzie – @joshuamack

Josh runs DBL, a training company that sepecialises  in L&D for the graduate market in Australia. He is the author of the Graduate Edge and a very good presenter. He can also be contacted by his facebook page if you are interested in furthering your graduates.

David Als – @davidals

David was recently the graduate manager at Macquarie Group before becoming a recruitment consultant and has been involved in strategic talent attraction @ Westpac. He is a consultant for Human Capital Management Solutions and is all about creative and leading edge attraction strategies in HR.

Aylin Ahmet – @aylinahmet

Although not directly involved in the Grad Industry, Aylin is a must follow. She is a research consultant @ Sensis and often tweets research and articles about topics that directly influence the Australian Graduate Industry.

Have I missed you?

To get on this list your twitter account has to be active but perhaps I am not following you yet! Just follow me / @ me @mikecasey and I will throw you in!

Statistics, they can be dangerous at times.

We’ve been hearing in the last week about one of our competitors in the graduate marketing space, specifically Graduate Opportunities, and how they are using statistics to compare our website to their website.

We thought that we should clarify things in a blog post for all of the people who have been presented with this information by Graduate Opportunities.

The Stats in Question

Graduate Opportunities is using a 3^rd party traffic ranking site, www.alexa.com (run by amazon.com) to outline that their website is the highest ranked graduate employment website in Australia by providing a direct comparison between ourselves and them as follows:

This image from alexa as at 11^th of May shows us in comparison to Graduate Opportunities. Our issue here is that they are using our www.gradconnection.com website, NOT our www.gradconnection.com.au website which is the site that we use to profile our clients in the Australian market.

Based off these figures, Graduate Opportunities claims that they are the most highly visited graduate employment website in Australia. This is not correct.

The reality

If Graduate Opportunities used the correct website in their comparison, this would be what they would be distributing to their clients:

When you compare the actual Australian GradConnection website with Graduate Opportunities, the results are significantly different. www.gradconnection.com.au is the 196,341^st most traffic ranked website in the world, over 550,000 places ahead of Graduate Opportunities and also in regards to Australia specifically, we are the 3,084^th most traffic ranked website in Australia, over 18,000 places ahead of Graduate Opportunities.

So using these statistics in the same way that the team at Graduate Opportunities have, we can now thank them for confirming that www.gradconnection.com.au is the most visited graduate program and employment website in Australia.

You can view these figures directly at these links here: GradConnection – Graduate Opportunities

Our Analytics

To clarify what these 3^rd party rankings mean, we’ve got an outline here of our traffic statistics between the start of February and the end of April, the peak graduate recruitment months here in Australia:

As you can see, we’ve had 197,942 visits from around 112,000 unique visitors to our site who on average stayed on the site for close to four and a half minutes. This time on site figure shows that graduates love how we’re presenting employers to them and also we can see that a large number of visitors come back to our site multiple times.

Another important factor is that over 90% of our visitors are actually located in Australia.

We take online analytics and statistical figures very seriously here at GradConnection so this year we have undertaken to be audited on a monthly basis by the Audit Circulations Bureaux and have audit certificates for all of our traffic. You can check us out on the Nielsen rankings in the employment section which is available with a login.

Our Value

We see the value in what we do with our website not just in pumping huge traffic numbers, but also engaging with graduates to open up new opportunities that they would not have thought of when commencing their career search and providing them with a resource we wish we had been able to tap into when we graduated from uni in the not too distant past.

From the feedback we’ve been receiving from employers and graduates alike, I think we’re doing a good job for both parties.

What next?

We have brought this error to the attention of the team at Graduate Opportunities and hope that they stop distributing these incorrect and misleading statistics as well as clarifying with any organisations that they have already presented this information to that they are not the highest visited graduate website in Australia.

It’s always hard to comprehend the size of the internet when you can’t physically see who’s online as opposed to seeing exactly who’s in front of you at the checkout in the supermarket, but it’s becoming more and more transparent with all the measurement tools out there such as Google Analytics and our favourite at GradConnection: Woopra. The main difference between the two is that Google Analytics will show you the history of traffic on your site vs Woopra which will show you the users currently on your site, it’s the difference between looking at the daily report of total customers a store manager at Coles and actually watching the customers in the store as they shop and seeing how they behave.

It’s often a challenge for us to visually portray the total amount of visitors we get on any one day, week or month to our site, the best we can do is say a number but just a number is hard to put into  perspective. Being at the John Mayer concert (which rocked by the way!) the other night in the sold out Rod Laver arena of 13,000 made me think, “so that’s what 13,000 people look like”. Being that we’re always checking the GradConnection site analytics I knew in my head that this equates to under a week’s worth of traffic to GradConnection.com.au and about 2 hours of traffic to our friends who we share an office with Bart and Kim’s American retail coupon site tjoos.com.

Graduate Careers Site Performance

Often we find that organisations career or graduate career sites go unmeasured and it’s simply just the measurement of applications along with quoting where the candidate first heard about the employer that give the metrics on the site’s performance. Simply putting Google Analyitics into your organisation or graduate careers site will show you exactly where your traffic is coming from and will allow you to give real measurements on the numbers coming through to your site, such as:

• Where Visitors are coming from – Referring Sites, Google, Direct
• Most popular pages – You’ll be surprised to see it’s not always the home page
• What parts of the world your visitors are from – Break this down again into cities
• Bounce rate – Are they finding you and leaving? Or are they hanging around?

This is only the tip of the iceberg on what Google Analytics can show you, if you’re anything like us you could spend days playing around in there.

Grasping the total visitors

When you’re looking at just the numbers it’s hard to put in perspective exactly how many people that is and what that amount of people would look like, whether you’re looking at a good day for us being 3,000 coming to our site vs a good day for tjoos.com being over 50,000. The best way for me to put this into a visual perspective is to think of the number of people I could see at the John Mayer concert and think over the past week we’ve had more visitors than a sold out John Mayer concert.

Here in Australia we’re transitioning from the application phase to the selection and assessment phase in the graduate recruitment cycle for many companies and an article in the last few weeks has been sticking in my mind that I thought might be relevant for some of you out there.

It’s a contentious subject, do you as a graduate recruiter look up a graduate applicants details on social networking sites such as twitter, facebook or linkedin to get more of an idea of the applicant’s personality and private life to see if they will be suitable for your organisation?

Social Media Snooping of Candidates in the USA

The article that spiked my interest in this and how it is handled in Australia recently outlined that many 20 something US based job seekers were hiding themselves in facebook so they couldn’t be found by the search functionality. The original article is on CNN and you can read it here. In a survey undertaken by Microsoft, they found that 70 percent of recruiters or hiring managers had rejected a candidate based on information they found online about them.

What’s it like here in Australia?

I thought social media ‘reference checking’ might be a good thing to have a think about at the moment as many organisations are heading into phone screening and assessment centres at the moment.

If your organisation hasn’t really thought about policies in regards to this you may want to check out a post on the SKM Graduates Tumblr account which outlines their position on how they will interact with any applicants on social networks, you can view the post here. SKM  has specifically outlined that they will never search for an applicant on facebook or look into the facebook profile of a graduate that fans them on their facebook page. The only social networking tool that they use as an organisation is LinkedIn. I think this policy is definitely an integral part of interacting with graduates online on the social web.

To be honest from what I’ve seen in Australia, many graduate recruiters simply don’t have the time to spend hours hunting down applicants on facebook before deciding to take them through to an interview or assessment centre.

My Experiences

Back in the day when I joined a graduate program, it’s actually been a few years now, facebook was not nearly as prevalent and pervasive as it is today. When I initially joined a graduate program and connected to the other grads on facebook, I think if there had been extensive reviews of many of their facebook profiles, a lot of them could potentially not have made it to the interviews at all judging by some of their pictures from their uni days and all of them have since gone on to get their careers rolling and are all going strong so maybe what someone does get up to in their private lives, no matter how crazy it is on the surface, isn’t a good indicator of how they are going to perform in the work place.

We’d be interested to hear from you (anonymously is an option if you like) about whether you have ever done a facebook check on an applicant or what your opinions on the subject are.

When I was at university, one in five people had laptops in their lecture theatres, there was no university wireless internet, and batteries lasted about 30 minutes. This has changed, and changed dramatically.

I was walking through the lecture theatres at Melbourne University and every seat had a power outlet and a network plug available.

Our intern Rob then proclaimed, to my initial amazement, that every graduate is now online during their lectures. They are on Facebook, Twitter or clearing out their inboxes.

Students on Laptops in a lecture

Wow. University has changed.

In stark contrast I was talking to a graduate from a state government department two weeks ago about how strict their internet policy was. Essentially there were only a select number of websites that employees were allowed to visit, and you had to apply for a business reason to have this changed. Forget Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Thankfully you can still check out the latest national news at news.com.au.

So what is going to happen with internal internet policy?

Well today marks the first day that one of the larger federal government departments has opened up Twitter and Facebook to its employees. The Federal government has been known to be strict on this in the past, so seeing this happen is a sign that changes are already starting to happen to ensure a good employer brand within the graduate recruitment industry.

I suspect that many graduates will be evaluating which employers to choose from based on their internet policies within the next couple of years, and I have anecdotal evidence of this happening already.

Today is the kick off of the 2010 Careers Fair season for Australian University students and it is also the start of GradConnection’s 2010 careers fair tour. We thought we’d put up the schedule on the blog so if you’re a graduate employer, you can remind yourself where you are meant to be at any given day and if you’re a job hunting student, you can figure out when employers will be visiting you on campus.

The National Schedule

So here we go, we have 38 careers fairs happening across 7 states and territories, there are going to be some very travel weary grad recruiters out there by the end of March.

To check out when the careers fairs are you can download the full schedule here.

GradConnection on Campus 2010

We thought we’d post up which fairs that we’d be attending so that you can come and say hi to who ever from the team is representing on the day and put a face to the name and the site. We’d be keen to see what you think about our new site and if you have any suggestions about how we can do things better we’d love to hear them.

We’re starting out this year today in Perth, here is our careers fair schedule:

Perth

Murdoch University – 3rd March
The Big Meet – 4th March

NSW

The Big Meet – 12th March
University of Newcastle – 25th March

Victoria

Swinburne University – 17th March
The Big Meet – 18th March

ACT/Canberra

Tertiary to work – 26th March

Queensland

Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus – 26th March
Bond University – 26th March
QUT – 29th March
University of Queensland – 31st March

As I write this, Dave and Mike are on the plane from Sydney to Perth to attend Murdoch and The Big Meet (Perth edition). We unfortunately can’t make it to the Curtin fair that we attended last year as it is in the following week and we have to be back in Sydney for the NSW version of The Big Meet.

After this we are down in Melbourne next to go to Swinburne and then the inaugural Victorian Big Meet which will be an interesting experience.

The following week is the beginning of the home stretch with a trip up to Newcastle University followed by a trek down to Canberra the following day. Mike and Gwilym have unfortunately drawn the short straw and while we’re down in Canberra will be forced to travel up to the Gold Coast to attend the Griffith Gold Coast and Bond University careers fairs. We’re looking forward to checking out the Gold Coast fairs as they were two that we didn’t manage to get to last year and have heard good things about the students who study in the GC.

The last two that we’ll be attending are QUT and the University of Queensland careers fairs. We were at QUT last year which was a good experience. We had an unlimited supply of Easter Eggs from the guys on the Aldi Graduate Program Stand and got some awesome video game posters from the team at THQ. We haven’t been to the University of Queensland fair before so will be looking forward to experiencing this as it was the 2^nd largest careers fair in Australia last year with 137 exhibitors.

Why come and talk to us????

If you’re at any of the careers fairs we are at, come and say hi and tell us about what you’ve studied and what career paths you’re interested in. We’ve actively surveyed over 45 major Australian Graduate Employers over the past 6 months so we’d be more than happy to provide you with some guidance on who the best employer for you might be and can even let you know if they’re at the career fair on the day so you can go speak to them in the flesh.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants Employment Evenings

If you are a soon to be accounting graduate, The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia is holding a number of accounting focussed careers evenings in all of the major state capitals in Australia. All of the employers will be members of The Institute, and this is a very worthwhile use of your time as every employer at the event will have accounting opportunities for you.

Check out the schedule of events here to find the one that is easiest for you to attend.

If you are attending the NSW Chartered Accountants event, we will be covering this for a follow up blog post so stay tuned.

You can also follow the Institute on Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date.

The Big Meet

I thought the Big Meet careers fairs were also worth a specific mention, as they are slightly different to your usual university organised careers fair. These fairs are open to all students from all universities to attend which means if for whatever reason you can’t make it to your own careers fair at your university, you have a backup plan where you can attend one of the Big Meets in either Perth (March 4^th), Sydney (March 12^th) or Melbourne (March 18^th). To find out more about these events and to pre-register your attendance, click here.

You can also follow The Big Meet on Twitter and Facebook which will keep you updated.

Good Luck

Good luck out there everyone whether you’re a grad recruiter or a job hunting graduate, we will catch you out on campus.

Hi, I’m Rob, studying full-time at UNSW and I don’t drink coffee, unlike everyone else in here.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending days in the office of GradConnection and it’s been a really (really!) cool experience. I first found GradConnection in Google, when I was searching for graduate job application deadlines in 2010. And when I was looking through the Graduate Forums on GradConnection, it turned out that the boys were searching around for an intern. So I gave @davejenkins a call and we met up for coffee (I had orange juice).

Digging into Facebook

I’ve always had an interest in social media and as business start to figure out how to monetize Facebook and YouTube in the new decade – I wanted to see what all the buzz was about.

So with some whacky Photoshop skills and a spluttering laptop, I had a crack at fixing up GradConnection’s Twitter Account and Facebook Fan Page. I had play around with the cosmetics… and it turns out that personalising a Facebook Page ain’t that hard.

When you click on the GradConnection Facebook Page, you now land on the “Boxes” tab which shows off pretty graphics to engage the user rather than a text wall. In addition, I we fixed up a few things here and there, put images and links to GradConnection’s Twitter and YouTube on the “Wall” tab as well as touch up those photos that Dave took on his Blackberry.

All this…

• Took me 10 minutes to learn FBML.
• Took me 1 hour to make the images.
• Took me 1 minutes to show it to the boys.

Then I went to investigate how Facebook users interact with these company profiles. I did a bit of research, and Facebook touts that their average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on “fb” a day, has 130 friends and only fans 2 pages a month. I distilled a lot of great research from Social Media Examiner, give it a read if you’re interested in the mechanism of consumer behaviour on social media!

Market Research – Guerrilla Style

I found out that Facebook advertising space is quite well fought over. The demographics that Facebook users reveal have specificities that marketers drool over. I wondered what the CTR for such specific advertising was, so I ran some searches and apparently (anecdotally) it sits somewhere around 0.04% to 0.2%.

Then I did my own guerrilla market research and I ran my own test.

I promoted GradConnection’s Facebook page to groups of my friends — through Facebook’s “Suggest to Friends” — that I thought would benefit from the service, i.e. soon to be graduates (this is not just meaningless promo spam!).

So I sent out to (some of these users overlap) the following users: 302 UNSW, 102 USYD, 27 UTS, 12 Macq, 50 High School Friends

There was no methodology behind the sample set. But it was roughly around 400 people that I sent a suggestion to.

• 4PM Wed 27 Jan 2010: GradConnection’s Facebook Page had 534 page.
• 12AM Fri 29 Jan 2010: 604 fans (at time of writing)

And a very quick headcount shows that 57 GradConnection’s fans are my friends.

That’s roughly, a 14% click through rate and a 10% increase in fans in 52 hours, pretty impressive for just one advocate of a website.

[Thanks sis for the correction, I'm still maths dummy].

Why?

Because personal recommendation may be better than just faceless advertising (that’s me in the picture above). There is still no doubt that word of mouth is the most effective form of promotions. But how do you inspire evangelists to personally recommend your product/page to their friends?!

Another contributing factor could be because the demographic of the people I was targeting and the students I know. Most of them are career orientated and are willing to respond to attempts at conversation between corporations and students (I bet a lot of these students are also fans of the Ernst & Young and Deloitte pages). Either that or – as I would like to believe (and self deluded I am) — my friends regard me as a valuable source of information. And while I do repost things that are quality — job opportunities and career-enhancing posts — I also post a lot of videos of Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Silence. I KILL YOU!!

Snowball effect.

I think there’s a significant snowball effect. While users who receive the suggestion may reject it initially, once their friends start ‘fanning’ it, they might be interested in why they chose to fan it.

Put it in front of your user once, they’ll forget it. Again, they might take note again. Third time, they might actually look at it! I’ve been keeping an eye on my social feed (and while Facebook aggregates news stories dependent on what I find engaging…) I saw the story that “X and Y number of friends became fans of GradConnection” consistently on my wall throughout the week.

And while I don’t want to take credit for the other 14 new fans – I think there’s a chance it may be a 2nd degree (therefore indirect) relation to me; they saw their friends fan it – and they checked it out.

So what does this all prove?

• targeted marketing WORKS! You will have a much better ROI on people who are interested in your message.
• social media, grown organically – is great engagement.
• people are mobile on Facebook – so fickle are the GenY!

PS: The day after Australia Day…
The great thing about public holidays is that it gives everyone a conversation topic, “so what’d you get up to yesterday?!” and “gosh it was hot wasn’t it?!” and more importantly — “do kiwis even celebrate Australia day?!” The 3 founders of GradConnection are from a special corner of Australia we call, New Zealand.

Merry Christmas

I’m sure a lot of you have already taken off on your Christmas and New Year’s break but hopefully a dedicated few are still around to check out this brief post. The Team at GradConnection would like to wish both graduates and graduate recruiters a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We’ve had a massive year getting really involved helping graduates and graduate employers connect in 2009 and 2010 is looking like it will be even more intense.

To the Employers

Thanks a lot to all of the employers on the GradConnection site in 2009 for your support and it’s been a pleasure working with all of you and look forward to continuing this into 2010.

We also have to say welcome on board to a number of new employers that are going to be going live on the GradConnection site in 2010 as well, we’re really excited about getting you all live.

To the Graduates

Thanks to all of you who have come to visit the GradConnection site throughout 2009. We hope it has been valuable to you as a tool to do some research on some potential employers before you have made your applications. Congratulations to all of you that have secured places on graduate programs for 2010 and good luck to all of you out there who are still on the job hunt.

We have improved the site massively in the second half of the year based on feedback from a number of you out there so a massive thanks to everyone who took the time to send us suggestions and ideas on how we could improve the site.

In 2010 we have gone out and found even more graduate employers for you to check out on our site and hope this makes it even more of a useful resource.

To our Partners

It’s been great working with a number of different organisations in partnership, we’ve learnt so much about the industry this year by working with a number of other companies that work in the graduate recruitment space. Thanks for all of your insights and knowledge.

So all the best to you all for the festive season everyone and we hope that 2010 will be a great year for you all.