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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well lately I read another story published here in the Australian press (The Age) that outlines that around one third of recent graduates are struggling to find work in China. The article quotes a representative of the Ministry of Education saying this is the highest rate of unemployment among new graduates since the start of recording statistics in 1996.

So why are these graduates having a tough time finding jobs?

One of the main reasons that graduates are finding it hard to secure graduate jobs in china is the huge growth in the number of graduates completing degrees at Chinese Universities, growing from around 1 million per year in 1998 through to the present 6 million per year in 2009 making competition fierce (check out the picture of a Chinese careers fair on our previous article here).

Some extra insights into this can be found from a chat I had a few weeks ago with a contact, Yvon, who works at an employer branding agency based in the Netherlands who works closely with multi-national graduate employers based in China.

She told me that even though there are so many graduate job hunters out in the market, multi-national companies are still battling to attract the right graduates to their organisations. Yvon mentioned that only around 10% of Chinese graduates have the right skills and academic background to obtain graduate positions in a multi-national organisation and this is backed up by findings from Mckinsey.

The cause seems to largely be from a mis-match between what universities are teaching students and what Chinese employers need from their graduate level employees.

The return of the Sea Turtles

Trends to watch out for are the return of the sea turtles to asia. A sea turtle is a slang name for a Chinese university student studying overseas. The reverse brain drain, the return of the sea turtles to china. Turtle in chinese has the same meaning or is pronounced the same as ‘coming home’.

Poaching graduates from Hong Kong and Singapore where university curriculums are more in tune with what multi-national organisations are looking for. Chinese employers are often facing a vacuum of talent for key positions. Yvon outlined that she has head of fast promotion of through to senior management level for professionals based in Singapore and Hong Kong when they relocate back to China far above where they were operating in their previous roles.

There is also the potential for the focus to turn to Chinese university students completing degrees in countries like Australia and New Zealand and try to lure them back to China.

Richard keeps writing them so we keep posting them, this story’s been published in the Canberra Times along with the Financial Review over the past week.

Graduates Turn to Canberra for Future Graduate Careers

Canberra is showing strong potential as a career destination for Australian University graduates according to new data released by careers website GradConnection.

From a national sample of 16,000 University graduates and students, a career in Government is the third most popular job choice across Australia, attracting 10.1% of those polled. More popular than a career in Government as a choice for grads are Accountancy (no. 1) and Engineering and Mining (no. 2).

However, among graduates attending Canberra universities, the number looking for a career in Government rockets to 23.6% and is by far the most popular career choice. Following Government, the most popular careers for Canberra-educated graduates are the IT industry (10.9%), Accounting (9%) and Law (7.9%).

Also pointing to good news for Canberra are the numbers of university graduates who regard Canberra as potentially a good place to work. Of the 16,000 graduates in the GradConnection poll, just 3% are from Canberra. But among the other 97% in the poll, 18% are open to the idea of their future career being in Canberra.

“The data suggests that Canberra is a more popular option for graduates to start their careers than has been previously thought,” said GradConnection director Dan Purchas. “It makes sense that graduates looking for careers in Government would consider Canberra as a good place to work, but the City is also appearing prominently in our data among some other major professions.”

If you want to find out more about Richard check him out @ www.rmgcoms.com.au, you can also follow him on twitter @richardmcg.

GradConnection – Home of the Canberra GradMaker and Government 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

The GradConnection Video Shoot

Last Week we blogged about the video shoot we did at the March Digital studios, this week we’ve posting Dan’s video on the accounting industry along with an article written by Richard McGowan of RMG Communications using the GradConnection sites data.

Accountancy Ranks as the No. 1 Career for Graduates

Despite the current economic difficulties, accountancy is Australia’s most popular career choice among university students and graduates according to data from GradConnection, the website where companies can interact with university graduates about employment opportunities.

From a sample size of 16,000 students/graduates at Australian universities, 13.6% are favouring accounting as their top career choice, in front of Engineering/Mining (11.2%), Government (10.1%) and Sales/Marketing (9.9%). The GradConnection site (www.gradconnection.com.au) covers 15 industry sectors.

“With many of the big accounting firms cutting back on their graduate intakes because of the economic slowdown, graduates start looking at some of the smaller firms for opportunities and use the internet to do the bulk of their research,” said GradConnection director Dan Purchas. “Second tier and smaller firms can have the same presence on the internet as the big companies in attracting top graduate talent and graduates and companies can interact on several levels about potential positions,” he said.

In the breakdown of roles within the Accounting profession, the GradConnection data shows 36.7% of grads are interested in financial accounting, 34.6% are interested in tax, 30.2% are interested in external audit, 29.4% are interested in internal audit and 27% are interested in management roles.

Also within the large pool of students/graduates looking for careers in Accountancy, 79.3% rank equal employment opportunities as the attribute they most value in sizing up potential employers. After this, the most important employer attributes are environmental sustainability (42.7%), health and safety (37.8%) and community contribution (37.3%).

“It’s also possible that graduates using the internet to research potential accountancy careers may find attractive opportunities in firms that are outside the Accountancy profession, but are still looking for top-class junior accountants for their financial operations,” said Purchas.

In terms of employer benefits that students/graduates are most looking for in potential employers, the GradConnection data reveals that 42.5% are looking for work/life balance, 38% are looking for opportunities for study leave, 35.7% are looking for a mentoring program and 28.1% would be attracted to structured training programs.

On the sometimes controversial points of employees “freedoms” at work, the GradConnection data show students/graduates would like access to Facebook (53.9%), msn (40.4%) and yahoo mail (32.7%).

GradConnection – Home of the Accounting GradMaker