Graduate Recruitment Blog

The AAGE Conference 2009

The annual AAGE conference (The Australian Association of Graduate Employers) is happening in Sydney next week between the 11^th and 13^th of November with graduate employers from all over Australia attending to share their thoughts about the state and future of graduate recruitment in Australia.

Paul Russell the AAGE Director and Chair and Ben Reeves the AAGE CEO will officially kick off the 3 days of the conference that will consist of workshops and presentations by members of the AAGE Committee, industry suppliers and other international graduate recruitment experts at the Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney. The conference covers a wide variety of topics ranging from how to attract graduates to your organsiation’s program, assessment and selection techniques and how to develop, engage and retain graduates once they have joined your graduate program. You can check out more information about the conference sessions on the AAGE Conference Program.

GradConnection at the AAGE

One thing that the GradConnection team is looking forward to is hearing about the High Flier’s graduate statistics from the past 12 months as well as future forecasts on how 2010 is shaping up. We’ll also be manning the GradConnection Exhibitor stand where we will be providing a sneak peak of some of the statistics that graduate job hunting visitors to our site have provided us throughout this year, so make sure you stop by and pick up a copy for yourself.

The After Party

Aside from all of the learning opportunities at the AAGE conference, there is a great set of social events over the three days, the highlight of which (and this is a completely unbiased view) will be the Gala Dinner After party which coincidentally is hosted by us this year. The venue is the 47^th story of the Australia Square tower building, the Orbit Bar. The theme is based around an Oscars after party seeing as the Graduate Recruitment Industry awards are announced earlier in the evening. Stop by our expo stand to pick up an invite with a map to the venue from the Gala Dinner. We have to give a big shout out to Ainsley from OneSteel for helping us to organize the night.

The AAGE Conference After Party at the Summit Bar

If you are attending the AAGE conference next week, make sure you come by our stand and say hi. There are no excuses – you can’t miss the stand – and we’ll also see you at the After Party!

For more information on the AAGE Conference check out the AAGE site at: www.aage.com.au

GradConnection – Home of the GradMaker

Continuing on from our video shoot is Mike Casey’s video on the IT graduate sector using information gathered in the first 6 months of 2009 from the GradConnection site & the below press release written by Richard McGowan of RMG Communications.

Graduate Employers and Grads use the internet to expand job searches

University graduates rank business analysis and project management as the two most popular jobs in the IT industry, according to new data from GradConnection, the website where companies can interact with university students and graduates about employment opportunities.

From preferences offered by 16,000 university students, the GradConnection data shows a total of 9.6% of graduates are seeking careers in IT, placing the sector as the fifth most favoured industry behind Accounting (13.6%), Engineering/Mining (11.2%), Government (10.1%) and sales/marketing (9.9%). The GradConnection data covers graduate input across 15 Australian industry sectors.

Within the IT sector, the most in demand jobs are business analysis (43%), project management (38.4%), development (35.2%), support (33.8%) and web development (32.5%). The least in-demand role from the data is software architecture at 16.6%.

“With the current economic difficulties dampening job opportunities across most industry sectors, students and graduates are using the internet to search widely for job opportunities in their chosen professions,” said GradConnection director Mike Casey. “IT is one of the most diverse industries because of the spread and reliance on technology by companies in diverse areas of business. The internet allows companies in all business sectors the opportunity to offer specialist IT opportunities, even if IT is not the company’s specific output.”

The GradConnection data also reveals the type of corporate qualities that graduates are most attracted to in potential employers. The top qualities are equal opportunity employment (86.7%), health and safety (36.8%), environmental sustainability (35.3%) and community contribution (22.7%).

In terms of the job benefits, graduates rate work/life balance the highest (37.1%), health cover (31.1%), structured training (30.2%) and overseas work opportunities (28.6%).

On the sometimes controversial question of certain “freedoms” offered by companies to their employers, IT hopefuls rate gmail as the most important (60.1%), Facebook (37.4%) and msn at 32.3%.

GradConnection – Home of the GradMaker

Without realising it, I am actually good friends with the project manager who won the 2008 Times Graduate Recruitment website awards in the UK. I worked under Regan Andrew as part of his team at Inland Revenue (IRD), the New Zealand Tax department as a humble and eager student, helping to build and promote online services to the New Zealand tax payer.

That was about five years ago, and now Regan is in the UK, and has recently made a huge impact in the UK graduate recruitment industry by project managing the Transport For London graduate recruitment microsite, that was judged #1 for content and #2 for design by successful UK graduates.

Personally, I am very interested in how to make effective and attractive graduate

recruitment websites and the best ways to market them, so I got on Facebook and had a bit of a chat to Regan about his successes with the Transport of London website, and what graduate recruitment teams in Australia and New Zealand could learn from his experiences.

First off, Can you tell us a bit about why your website won the Times award? What were the criteria and what made your site come out on top?

A company (High Fliers – the same company that performs the AAGE surveys) interviewed 16,000 graduates about graduate recruitment campaigns from a range of UK organisations, one aspect of which was their websites. The graduates ranked our site 2nd for overall design and 1st for content. I think that we ranked highly because everyone involved was 100% committed to delivering what the users of the site wanted and needed.

Do you think the UK graduate market is unique or would you take the same approach for graduate program websites in Australia and New Zealand?

The UK market is not unique. However, I’m not sure that the exact same approach would be appropriate in NZ or Australia, as the size of the market and the level of competition is far greater here. Also, the HR industry in the UK is more transactional and consequently, applicants’ expectations are different.

What was your key measurement to the success of your graduate recruitment website? Simply the number of applications or did you take into account the number of visitors, time on site, bounce rate etc…

A range of factors were taken into account, including standard metrics such as usage, conversion rates, calibre of applicants and client satisfaction. However, the key factor was what graduates themselves thought of it. To understand their views, our organisation contributed to a study in which 16,000 graduates were interviewed about 100 graduate recruitment campaigns.

Are graduate recruitment websites similar to any other websites or do you need to pay special attention to key areas?

A focus on the needs of users is common to all well designed web sites. Graduate recruitment sites have unique content requirements that flow from this theme. Users generally want to know about:

• The schemes / openings that are available
• The types of candidates being sought (including minimum requirements)
• Benefits, including pay rates
• Previous graduates – what they did whilst undertaking the graduate scheme and what they have done since How to apply

So I know you have been a web guru for a number of years, what got you into building a graduate recruitment website and what tech skills came in handy?

Web guru eh?! I didn’t actually build the site… I just managed the building of it. We had five suppliers and a team of internal specialists working on the project. My technical input was the application of management and design methodologies. Having a background in web technologies was helpful, but not essential.

Did you use any social media in conjunction with your graduate site? Did you utilise a facebook fan page, how about twitter?

No social media mechanisms were used in our 2008 campaign, although we did provide a RSS feed for the recruitment fairs.

Did your traffic come via organic search engine traffic or via other mediums?

Search engine traffic is always important for websites. However, a massive proportion of our traffic was generated through navigation paths from the core website (which ranks in the top 100 websites in the UK and amongst the top 2,500 worldwide).

From your experience, what did graduates most like about your site?

The clean design and the content.

What did you most like about your site?

That we went live on time, we were within budget and graduates liked it

If you were to outsource a graduate recruitment website, what kind of budget would you expect to need?

There are too many factors to consider… the size of the organisation in question, the target audience, the complexity of the schemes etc. However, if you’re thinking about outsourcing you should first think:

Do we have the skills in-house to do this well? Are the people with those skills available within our time-frames? Is this the best use of their time? If no, then you need to outsource.

We had a mixed approach, with specialist agencies hired for specific tasks (e.g. overall campaign design, flash components, web page development, security review), whilst internal teams developed content and provided quality assurance. We selected this approach because of time constraints… the website had to be designed, built and delivered in just over a month.

Can you give any advice to grad managers in Australia and New Zealand around how to make a good graduate website, and what are some of the pitfalls?

• Follow a user centred design methodology and undertake user testing early in your design lifecycle
• Follow basic web standards such as accessibility, this will give you better cross-browser compatibility, higher search rankings and more people will be able to use your site
• Know your target audience and make sure that both your creative design and the writing style of your copy attracts the people you are looking for
• Graduates are probably not coming to your site to look for computer games! Online games are expensive to develop and will not make your organisation look “cool”
• Make sure that you have an integrated approach to your campaign – your website should complement the campaign, rather than being the campaign in its entirety
• Be very careful with your copy. Don’t use acronyms or jargon and keep your copy brief

Many thanks for your time to comment Regan, very glad to see you’re making a similar impact in the online space in the UK. I’m keen to see what you end up doing in the next couple of years!

Also a quick welcome to subscribers we have had joined our blog from South East Asia over the last few weeks. Hopefully we can give you some valuable insight into the Australian and New Zealand graduate recruitment markets. If you have any interesting tales you can contribute to this blog then please let us know!

Mike

Last Friday lunch time, Dave and I attended the Australian Association of Graduate Employers (AAGE) Sydney graduate panel. The session had a good turn out with around 40 people attending from around 20 – 25 graduate employers as well as a scattering of various suppliers to the graduate recruitment industry. The AAGE runs the graduate panel sessions at least twice a year and I had missed the last one which was at the annual conference in November last year.

The Lunch

Seeing as this was a lunch time session, I better cover the important things first. The catering was pretty good with an interesting selection of sandwiches containing such tasty fillings like prawn and avocado as well as chicken, cranberry and brie and there was also a good selection of biscuits and fruit so thanks a lot to the Reserve Bank for hosting the session and putting on a good spread.

The Panel

The grad panel session is an interesting concept; five different AAGE member organisations participate by providing one of their recently recruited graduates to field questions from the audience about their experiences finding a graduate position and what life has been like after starting work. The Sydney panel was made up of grads from the following firms:

• Accenture (IT Graduate)
• Commonwealth Bank (Marketing Graduate)
• GHD (Civil Engineering Graduate)
• OneSteel (HR Graduate)
• Reserve Bank of Australia (IT Graduate)

The Questions

Numbers of applications made and offers received: There was a wide range of extremes on the number of applications the grads had made and the number of offers they had received. One grad had made 55 applications all carefully tracked in a spreadsheet in order to receive 2 offers whereas another grad had made only 3 applications in total but received offers from all 3 companies.

Sources used in the graduate job hunt: The graduates all seemed to have used the internet as a primary job hunting tool. Search engines played a big part in discovering and researching graduate employers. The graduate who had 2 years of prior commercial work experience seemed to be the only one who heavily used job boards as a resource.

Impact of the GFC on graduate recruitment: this question was inevitable but the reality was that the GFC has no impact on this intake of graduates as when they were being recruited early in 2008 the economy was still going strong and the GFC had not fully developed into what it is today. It will be interesting to see what next year’s graduates have to say about it though.

Did you feel that you had enough prior knowledge or experience to start your graduate role: Most of the graduates on the panel said that they had all had previous relevant work experience in their chosen fields and this was the key factor that had helped them to quickly get up to speed once they joined the workforce permanently as a graduate. It’s a bit of a no brainer but previous work experience is potentially one of the key factors that will determine how quickly they will adjust to working life at your organisation.

There was a scattering of other questions throughout the session but one I found interesting ‘how do you feel about psychometric testing as part of the assessment process?’ which apart from one of the grads they all expected and were comfortable with, although a further point was that the purpose of the testing did need to be explained to the candidates sitting them to give some meaning to the process.

The Verdict

Overall it was an interesting experience and if you are in the graduate recruitment field I’d recommend that you make an effort to attend these events once a year. You get to see five of Australia’s larger graduate employers bring a showcase of their top graduates for public scrutiny. If you are interested in attracting these graduates to your organisation it will provide you with a good insight into what these graduates are thinking.

If you attended an AAGE Graduate Panel session let us know what you thought, and if you are interested in attending these events in the future you may want to investigate becoming and AAGE member as attendance for members to these events is free.