Graduate Recruitment Blog

Chris Walker of March Digital runs a studio where he has all the tools to shoot, edit and deliver videos over an online client dashboard platform. Recently we were invited out to shoot some short videos on our findings over the past 6 months on what graduates have been telling us on the GradConnection website. None of us at GradConnection had any experience of being on a set (well apart from myself who once had a line in a New Zealand TV show I’d rather not reveal the name of). It’s intimidating looking directly into the camera while the teleprompter turns through the text like the opening credits of Star Wars, and far harder than most anchor men make it look. Finally after about 3 hours of shooting and 20 takes later we’d produced about 4 minutes of usable footage, not a bad effort for a few IT guys unfamiliar with being on a set.

Filming is easy right?

Before shooting our videos we were quite the critics when it came to videos on employer’s careers sites, generally thinking that we could do a far better job and how hard can it be to shoot a decent video?! Turns out very, not to say there’s not any good graduate careers videos out there, it’s just the bad really stand out and not in a good way. I’m sure you’ve come across those where the videos that are either out of sync or over hyped up to attract grads to the organisation, missing the point of getting the employer’s brand across or portray what life would be like to working as a grad. On the flip side we have seen some really good graduate videos out there and those employers that do get it right have a valuable tool for their graduate attraction and careers site.

What we learnt after the shoot

It starts with using the professionals to guide you through it, it’s the little things that make all the difference, sound, lighting but the biggest difference is a good director. You wouldn’t ask Brett Ratner (Director of the Rush hour trilogy and a list of other C grade movies) to do a Quentin Tarantino film for obvious reasons, but it would no longer be a Taratino which is what you’d go for in the first place. You also have to watch out for the Michael Bay (Pearl Harbour, Transformers) style directors, these are the ones that will make it sound so good, and will produce a sharp looking video, only problem is it’s full of explosions which look cool but leave no room for plot. It’s the same with doing your own filming for your graduate careers site, if you don’t find the right director who knows what they’re doing you could end up with a disappointing Ratner, or an over hyped Michael Bay, instead of the smooth Taratino which will always leave your audience wanting more.

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

Deadliest Catch the TV Series

Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of the ‘Deadliest Catch’ lately but, with careers fairs finishing up two months back and many of the larger graduate programs currently completing assessment and making offers, it made us think about how seasonal the graduate recruitment process is in Australia and it has some good parallels with the short and intensive crab fishing season. To satiate our curiosity we have done some digging on how many graduates are still out there looking for jobs.

It’s not an easy question to answer, surely if the majority of graduate programs have closed then why are graduates still looking? It seems that due to the highly competitive nature of Grad Recruitment in Australia, careers fairs are very early in the year and application closing dates can be too soon for many would be graduate job hunters. If you compare Australia to New Zealand, many of the larger companies in New Zealand have only just started their graduate recruitment campaigns in the last month (May).

Graduates are still looking online

It has been interesting to see that traffic to our site has only reduced slightly from the peak job hunting times of the year in March and April and from what we have seen there is still a huge amount of activity on the search engines from grads looking for jobs. 100,000 job related searches in a Month when many of the major graduate programs have closed their applications means many organizations missing out on extra good quality candidates as well as a lot of grads picking through a diminishing amount of graduate programs.

Careers fairs may have been a catalyst that has sparked off the interest for grads to start thinking about jobs potentially due to the fact that a few grads out there are regretting finding out about them too late to take action. I think we are predicting that after the current exam period is over there will be a large spike in the number of grads out there searching for jobs.

Do you want these grads?

You may think ‘if they aren’t organized enough to follow my organizations recruitment process throughout university or attend their university’s careers fair than they’re not the sort of candidates we’re looking for anyway’, but that’s probably a bit harsh considering the grads aren’t graduates yet and still have a whole year of university to get through in what is considered their most important year. Put yourself in the graduates shoes for a minute, it’s not easy to kick off the year by getting into your classes and simultaneously thinking about next year’s job options when you’ve barely opened a text book.

The trends in the graduate job hunter space are extremely interesting and we will be keeping an eye on them closely and reporting back with updates throughout the year, there are some awesome new tools coming online such as the Google Zeitgeist suite so get on and check it out and see if this is going to allow you to change the way you do things at your organization or whether the crab fishing model of graduate recruitment is the one for you.

Contact GradConnection

Well last week we ended up catching up with Richard McGowan who has had a diverse career starting out as a journalist with a small paper in rural Australia. We got to talking about work experience and he brought up an interesting point between his days as an entry level journalist and today’s work environment.

Richard had an interesting point about what it was like when he started working as a journalist compared to how they are these days. His first role was working as a crime reporter in Newcastle where he would write stories and then dictate them by phone to typists in the Sydney office. When back at the office there was a lot of activity with runners zipping messages to different parts of the organisation, the manual processes, and lack of technology means that there was a lot to see and experience in the work place.

Today’s Graduate Working Environment

These days most offices are a lot more generic due to the wide spread use of computers in the modern office. This means that generally graduates across industries will start their careers in very similar physical environments regardless of whether they’re an engineer, accountant, IT specialist or a journalist. This means because everything from a graduates work to communication both internally and externally is often done in one form or another by their computers, whether it be Outlook, Word, instant messaging, etc. Therefore a big differentiator for your organisation over your competition is what your organisation allows employees to do on the internet while at work.

Social Networking sites used by Graduates

Banning sites like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail is becoming common in today’s workplace and the usual reasons are to protect sensitive data and reduce anything that impedes productivity amongst staff.

Almost 3000 graduates told us the social networking sites that they would like to see in the workplace as shown in the graph below:

Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing

There have been some interesting studies that have shown that ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ or WILB as it is now known has been believed to actually increase productivity in staff who are able to use these leisure sites while they are at work. There is an interesting article you can read about this from the daily mail here.

From what we’ve seen, the graduates visiting our website have overwhelmingly outlined that they value the use of websites they use socially outside of work. This is an area worth investigating to inform your graduates on how the internet can and should be used at your organisation and why these rules are in place as the grads come on board, as up until this point they have no doubt been able to do whatever they like online whenever they want to.

Internet access may seem trivial, but to your average gen-yer graduate not having access to your Facebook, gmail and Twitter accounts can feel like losing your 6th sense.

Well its been just about 2 months since the main careers fair season has ended for 2009 and last week we received an interesting email provided by the Australian Association of Graduate Employers (AAGE). For the first time ever the AAGE has analysed attendances at the careers fairs that have been held at universities across Australia.

Careers Fairs Statistics

The report has given us some interesting stats about the amount of organisations looking to hire graduates as well as which universities seem to be the most popular amongst graduate employers.

• 596 different organisations attended careers fairs in 2009 – most were companies that are recruiting directly but there are a small number of Associations and other organisations (like us) that do not directly employ graduates.

• 40 careers fairs were held nationwide – between 3rd March and the 8th of April. An interesting point to note is that some of the major graduate programs closed their applications before the end of the careers fair season meaning many of the Queensland careers fairs aren’t utilised by some organisations’ graduate recruitment drives.

• The most careers fairs attended by one organisation was 35 out of 40 and on average organisations attended 4.25 careers fairs each.

Careers Fair Attendance Spread

Another interesting stat was the amount of careers fairs that were attended by employers, with nearly half attending just one university careers fair.

• 70 organisations attended 10 or more careers fairs; We think this stat shows that even though the economy is not in the best shape there are still a large number of organisations that are looking to hire substantial numbers of graduates from all over Australia.

• 248 organisations attended between 2 and 9 careers fairs; this seems to indicate that there are a serious amount of organisations at the state level that are on the hunt for good graduates for midsized graduate programs and smaller amounts of graduate jobs.

• 278 organisations went to only 1 careers fair; it’s interesting to see that there are a large number of presumably smaller employers that are actively getting out and promoting themselves in the graduate market.

Careers Fairs By State

In terms of employers, it appears that the Victorian university careers fairs are most popular to attend with an average of 76 organisations attending. The University of Melbourne took the honours of having the most graduate employers attend their careers fair in 2009 with 146 employers.

• Western Australia – total of 4, biggest fair was Curtin with 106, average was 65 graduate employers per careers fair
• Victoria, total of 8 – Biggest was Melbourne Uni with 146, average was 76 graduate employers per careers fair
• South Australia – total of 6, biggest was Uni of South Australia with 89, average was 48 gradaute employers per careers fair
• New South Wales – total of 10, biggest was UNSW with 118, average was 65 graduate employers per careers fair
• Queensland total of 9 – biggest was Uni of Queensland with 137, average was 63 graduate employers per careers fair
• Tasmania – one fair only with 43 graduate employers attending
• Northern Territory – one fair only with 37
• Canberra – one fair only combining 3 universities of students with 68 graduate employers attending

Our Experiences at University Careers Fairs 2009

It was our first time out on the campaign trail and we attended 15 careers fairs in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane and Canberra. The best fairs that we attended in terms of layout and the amount of grads we spoke to were probably the NSW Big Meet and the Monash Careers Fair, even though Monash was 6 hours long! We have to give an honourable mention to the Queensland fairs we attended due to the fact that it gave us a good excuse to go to Dreamworld : )

2010 Careers Fairs and Beyond

It would be interesting to compare next years careers fair attendances with that of 2009. Anecdotally we have heard that a lot of employers pulled back on the number of careers fairs they attended in 2009 but we are unable to come to any measurable conclusion.

We were generally surprised to see the number of graduate employers that went to only 1 careers fair, evidence of very targeted graduate attraction marketing. Are companies going to continue with the shot-gun approach to graduate recruitment? Or are we going to see careers fairs continue to be come more localised?

We have heard the figure that 1 in 4 final year students attend their university careers fair but this figure is subject to verification. Can anyone shed light on the percentage of grads that attend these fairs and whether or not this has increased or decreased during tense economic times?

Nearly half of Australian Graduates will have a bad experience on a graduate website.

It came as a bit of a shock to us, but some Australian Graduate Program Websites we have seen over the past year don’t seem to work well in many of today’s popular website browsers. These websites can either look bad, or simply not work in Firefox, Safari and others  (which make up nearly half of Australian graduate traffic).

What is website browser optimisation?

To start off lets cover what browse optimisation means. In a nutshell, web browser optimisation involves making sure that your graduate recruitment web page is displayed correctly in the different web browsers used by graduates today. I thought that this topic is worth a blog post because these days an organisations website is fast becoming the most valuable marketing tool in the arsenal of generating graduate job applications. Once you’ve done the hard yards to attract graduates to your site through careers fairs and on campus presentations you don’t want to scare them off because they think your website is broken.

So how do you check your graduate website works?

To test whether or not your site is being displayed properly to your graduate job hunters you can cover most of your bases by simply visiting your site in the web browsers and checking them out for yourself:

Microsoft Internet Explorer

This browser comes by default with windows operating systems and most corporates and many universities will provide this as their standard web browser. There are a wide variety of versions for this browser the most common being versions 6.0 and 7.0. Version 8.0 has just been released and more users will slowly move to this newer version.

Mozilla Firefox

This is a popular browser that many users are migrating to on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can download a copy here.

Safari

This browser comes standard with an Apple computer. With the large amount of Apple fans out there this is becoming quite a popular browser and it is used when browsing the web from and iPhone as well. You can download a copy here

You may need to try some of these browsers at home as you may not have the security permissions you need in the office.

Why is it important to run these tests?

Most websites are optimised for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser as it comes by default with the windows operating system. This is due to Internet Explorer having the majority of internet users historically.

Over the past two months we’ve had around 30,000 graduates come to our website to view potential graduate employers and we’ve found that there has been a substantial shift away from Internet Explorer as the standard web browser used by graduates; you can see the breakdown of our traffic in the table below:

Browser	% of Graduate users
Microsoft Internet Explorer	52%
Mozilla Firefox	37%
Safari	6%
Other	5%

We’ve seen a wide variety of different employers graduate websites that have had issues when viewed in different browsers and you can see that close to 50% of graduate job hunters are using a different browser than the ‘standard’ Internet Explorer.

This in contrast of total market share, where Microsoft Internet Explorer enjoys a market share of 66% (hitslink.com).

Optimise your graduate website for all major web browsers!

From the statistics we have generated, it is clear that nearly half of all Australian Graduates use a web browser other than Internet Explorer. This is well above the internet industry standard for browser use probably due to the fact that Australian Graduates are extremely technology Savy in comparison with general internet users.  We strongly recommend that you check your website, especially if it is older, to see how it performs under other browsers. We have heard of several websites that have become a major barrier-to-entry for graduates looking for jobs.

All website designers now create websites that adhere to industry standards, so if you decide your website needs re-development, you could get the majority of this covered for around $5000. We can happily point you in the direction of a few great website designers if required.

Let me know if you have any more questions about this topic, hopefully it helps you catch any issues on your grad site in the future.

With the careers fair season largely over for 2009 and many of the major graduate recruitment campaigns closed for applications we’ve had a chance to review some of the things graduates have been telling us about what they are looking for in an employer.

One of the most interesting aspects that we’ll be taking a look into for this blog post has been the locations that graduates are looking to start their careers in 2010.

So where do Australian graduates want to work in 2010?

Over March and April we had 7,937 graduates that visited our website tell us the top 3 locations in Australia they were interested in working after they graduate and move to the work force in 2010.

Here is an overview of the top 5 ranking cities that graduates are hoping to find work in 2010:

City	Number of Responses	Percentage of Responses
Melbourne	4,381	55.20%
Sydney	3,901	49.15%
Brisbane	1,875	23.62%
Canberra	1,416	17.84%
Perth	1,124	14.16%

The biggest surprise in the data we have collected is that Melbourne is a more popular work destination for Australian graduates than Sydney, by a margin of just over 6% of respondents.

The second major surprise was the popularity of Canberra as a desirable work destination for graduates as there seems to be a well attached negative stigma about Canberra as a destination for graduates.

Where are Graduates located during their job hunt?

To put the figures above into perspective we need to look at where these graduates are currently based. After reviewing the GradConnection web server logs we have had 21,205 graduates visit the site and here is a breakdown of where in Australia they come from:

City	Graduate Visitors	Percentage of Visitors
Sydney	8,418	39.70%
Melbourne	6,870	32.40%
Brisbane	2,253	10.62%
Perth	1,372	6.47%
Adelaide	874	4.12%
Canberra	765	3.61%
Hobart	238	1.12%

Where our traffic has come from largely matches up to the population distribution of the major Australian cities so it seems to be a good representation of graduates around Australia.

Over 70% of grads came from Sydney and Melbourne with 40% and 32% respectively.

One interesting feature was the fact that over 1400 graduates wanted to work in Canberra, however we only had around 750 graduate visitors from Canberra visit the site overall.

So Melbourne Takes the Honours

So it seems that graduates are more than willing to move from where they are currently based in order to land their first job. It might also be a wise move for employers with graduate positions in Melbourne to promote the fact that the roles they have available are in Melbourne as it may attract more graduates to apply.

Thats all for the graduate recruitment blog for now but we have a stack of other blog topics that will be coming regularly over the next few months. Feel free to send any feedback or if you would like us to cover a specific topic fire an email to danp@gradconnection.com