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

Well there has been a huge amount of hype this week about the Oz lotto $90 million lottery draw and we thought we’d combine graduates, facebook and a 24 line mega pick Oz lotto ticket to see what would happen.

The Offer

We’ve been slowly chipping away at the GradConnection facebook page during the year and as at midday 30th June 2009 we had organically grown to around 115 fans. We decided that morning to use the massive $90 million Oz lotto draw to see if we could attract some new fans so we walked down to the news agent and picked up a ticket.

The offer we had on the table was that every person who became a fan of the GradConnection facebook page would be eligible for a share of the prize money should we win a major prize. With the ticket bought and the promotion created we then pushed out the link to our facebook fan page through twitter, facebook and youtube intensively over 8 the hours before the lotto draw.

The Results

Well to start off with we didn’t end up winning a cent from our Oz Lotto ticket which was disappointing. By the end of the day we had grown our facebook fans by around 330 to a total of about 450 fans which would have worked out to $200,000 each if we won the prize. You can see Dave making our official video announcement here:

Some Lessons

Running the promo campaign was a great learning exercise in a number of areas.

Firstly it showed us how hard you have to work to grow an online community and the amount of interaction is not huge and maybe around 2% of people will interact with you on your page. We initially had our fan page wall set to only display posts made by GradConnection and this did cut down on the number of fans who were posting to the wall. We changed this setting mid afternoon and it did increase the amount of interaction from our new fans.

The key lesson is that when you are running a page about your organisation’s graduate program you need to regularly push out updates and new content like pictures and video even though you may only see minimal responses from your graduate audience. By generating this content and making the page look like there is regular activity you actually provide a compelling reason for graduates to become fans and check back regularly for updates.

These days if you are generating social media content it is a good idea to cross reference all of your social media streams with each other. In our campaign we were using twitter to refer people back to facebook and posting videos on youtube which we then posted to our facebook fan page so our fans were coming into contact with use via 3 different channels.

The Pay Off

With the increased activity and fans on our facebook page we’ve already been able to publicise some IT development positions for a midsized .com based in Sydney and they’ve made a number of phone interviews with interested graduates.

The downside of the day was a fan that we attracted who after we made a post asking our fans to put in suggestions for our next campaign he suggested we kill ourselves, to make matters worse his profile picture shows him brandishing two very realistic hand guns.

If you’re interested in seeing some other examples of good graduate focussed facebook pages check out the IBM and Bovis Lend Lease graduate program facebook fan pages.

If your organisation is running a facebook page let us know so we can sign up to become fans and our GradConnection page will become a fan of you too. Also now is the time for you to claim your organisations facebook friendly URL for example here is the GradConnection friendly URL http://www.facebook.com/GradConnection which you can then use on your printed marketing materials.

P.S. hello to our new Japanese readers!

I ended up being a bit under the weather last week so the blog post from last week is now this weeks blog post.

While I was off work recuperating, I started thinking again about our very first blog post which looked at the most popular location for graduate jobs in Australia. Our very first blog post was about how Melbourne was the most attractive city for graduate job hunters and re-reading it over the week got me thinking about how ready Australian graduates are to relocate for their first graduate job on leaving university.

From that first blog post we found that 55% of graduate job hunters were interested in Melbourne as a place to take up their first graduate position. This fact gets even more interesting when you consider that only 30% of the visitors to our site were actually based in Melbourne to begin with.

Relocate? Sure why not

To take things a step further I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how many graduates were interested in relocating to multiple cities after they had finished up at university, so as you do when you’re sick, I ended up sitting down and hitting our database to see how many graduates were interested in relocating to secure their first graduate job and the results were as follows:

Relocation Locations	% of Graduate Respondents
3	39.5%
2	16.5%
1	44%

The Breakdown

This is an interesting insight into the attitude of graduates as they are searching for their first graduate job as it shows 3 distinct mindsets.

Firstly there are the 44% of grads who only want to work in one location after they finish their university studies. My thinking on this is that these graduates either want to work and live in their home town or the town they have relocated to for university.

The next group which accounts for 16% of graduates are interested in moving to 2 locations. I think this shows that these graduates have relocated for university and would want to either stay where they are studying or return to their home town.

The remaining 39% of graduates are out to work in 3 or more locations after they finish studying which shows that a large proportion of graduates coming out of university in Australia are very flexible and are keen to do whatever it takes to find a good opportunity. I think this is the group I would have fallen into when I finished studying at university as I was keen to move anywhere  I could secure an opportunity, I even considered going to Norway at one point.

Summing Up

So it seems that the majority of Australian graduates, 56% to be precise, are motivated to relocate once they finish studying which is a good sign for locations such as Western Australia, Queensland and Canberra as these centres do have a high demand for graduates but don’t’ have the largest numbers of graduates studying there compared to Sydney and Melbourne.

This week I was reading a story published on News.com.au about how difficult graduate jobs have been to find this year in Australia compared to a year ago. The sectors the article outlines as being hardest hit have been Accounting, Finance and Mining, with graduate job hunters now being lucky to receive a single job offer this year as opposed to potentially having multiple offers in these sectors in the previous few years.

This got me thinking about the state of the graduate jobs market in other areas of the world and the biggest market that popped into my mind to investigate was China.

The state of the Graduate Jobs Market in China

The scale of Graduate Job hunters in China is just immense. There are approximately 6 million graduates finishing university every year making it extremely competitive amongst Chinese graduates fighting for a declining number of graduate jobs. The Chinese government has been implementing an initiative to increase the levels of education of the Chinese people however their economy is still largely focused around manufacturing which combined with the economic downturn is making it hard for graduates leaving university to find work.

Things sound like they are going to be getting more difficult for Chinese graduates in years to come as well. On top of there being 6 million new graduates finishing university each year, there is a hangover of 1 million graduates from the previous year who still have not found work, as well as another 3 million graduates from years before still looking for work. An article from the Wall Street Journal shows that in the last 10 years there has been an increase in the number of Chinese university students of about 1 – 2 million per year so the shortage of graduate positions is likely to grow. The growth in student numbers is also proving to be a problem as faculties are not growing at the same speed making it more difficult to provide a high level of education to the increased student base.

Some Strange Hurdles for Chinese Graduate Job Hunters…

Some of the requirements for a graduate job in China can also be challenging. One conversation at a careers fair for a graduate technology sales role had a sign posted next to the stand outlining a height requirement of 172cm for men and 162cm for women in order to be eligible for the position. The sign also stated that applicants must be ‘attractive’. When a graduate approached the company representative he was then asked ‘how much can you drink’ as drinking in the sales process is very important in Chinese culture. The interested graduate then said ‘well I can drink 3 or 4 beers in a sitting no problem’ to which the company representative replied ‘I’m not interested in how many beers you can drink, I’m talking hard liquor here’.

Chinese Government Graduate Jobs

Due to the shortage of positions there has also been a huge increase in the number of applications to work for the Chinese Government and by increase I mean there have been an additional 130,000 applications made by graduates bringing the total number of applications to 775,000 in 2008. These applications have been made for only 13,500 graduate jobs so there is only 1 job per 60 or so applicants.

So in short the global economy is making things tough in Australia for Graduate Job hunters but spare a thought for the millions of Chinese grads struggling to find work over the next few years. Check out the video below if you can for some extra info on the subject provided by the Guardian newspaper.

GradConnection

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.

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