Graduate Recruitment Blog

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.

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

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

We’ve been busy, very busy in fact and GradConnection 2.0 is here, alive and kicking. We know a lot of you have visited the site in its current format over the last 6 months and we’re hearing back now from some of the final year university students who have successfully obtained positions on graduate programs around Australia that they first found out about from our website.

We’ve reviewed how you’ve all been using our website and had a brain wave about 3 months ago on how we can improve the site for next year’s graduate job hunters and this is what we’ve come up with:

This replaces the old Graduate Program Wizard which we thought was a bit geeky (we’re all IT graduates) so with the rebuild came a new name for our service which helps to match the best graduate employers to you at an  individual level.

The Breakdown

We’ve organised our employers to enable you to filter through them by the industry that they offer graduate positions in, a few of the major ones are:

• Accounting
• Engineering
• Information Technology
• Government

As well as that, we know that the locations offered by organisations for their graduate jobs vary so having a filter on location has been another big move for us to streamline, you can view employers by location here:

• Sydney
• Melbourne
• Perth
• Canberra
• Adelaide
• Brisbane

You can then combine these location and industry searches together to find employers in specific locations and specific industries, for example:

• IT graduate positions in Sydney
• Accounting Graduate Jobs in Canberra

From here you are able to refine the best employers for you based on the roles they offer in each industry, the benefits they offer their employees on their graduate programs as well as finding our more about their organisational values.

What’s next?

We’re working hard to get as many employers on board to make this a valuable resource for all graduates in Australia so let us know, as a graduate, which organisations you want to learn more about and we’ll go and talk to them on your behalf to see if we can dig up some more information. Post up any organisations you’re interested in finding out more about in the comments section below.

If you’re an employer and you want to know how to get on the GradMaker system, get in touch with us through any of the channels listed here.

We have been getting asked about Twitter more and more this year by a number of grad managers and grad teams. It seems that the concept of tweeting for employer brand promotion and networking is not as foreign as it was in 2008. That being said, most grad managers in Australia still do not know where to start with twitter.

So I decided the best way to get people started, is to comprise a list of my favourite tweeters in the graduate space and the reasons why you should follow them!

My Favourite Graduate Recruitment Tweeters

@JessicaBooth – Jess is a Senior HR advisor at CSIRO. She is very active on twitter and is also behind @HRClubSyd, a group for HR professionals in Sydney.

@ManthaUKinOz– Samantha is the graduate manager at Deloitte NSW. She is reasonably new to Twitter herself, but a great person to talk to about the accounting industry, careers fairs and universities.

@KoShaughnessy – Kelly has helped us out a lot, especially when GradConnection was in its first few weeks. She is very approachable and is a close monitor of the bleeding edge research being done on the HR industry in Australia.

@JaredWoods – My twitter experience would not be complete without @jaredwoods. He is the head of employer brand at SKM Consulting in Melbourne, we have since caught up with Jared a number of times after meeting on twitter (called a tweetup ). Originally, Jared is from an advertising agency background and has great insights on where this industry is going and a great example of inhouse employer branding, check out http://www.domoregofurther.com.au/.

@pauljacobs4real – I had a tweetup with Paul for the first time over a long awaited Wellington Coffee. Paul is from New Zulland and is the head of Recruitment 2.0 Asia Pacific, a great social network for HR professionals. Paul is also an entrepreneur, working to on tribeHQ and has quantities of experience in internal graduate recruitment.

@DanNuroo – National Recruitment Manager at DWS – Dan loves hassling the fact that we are all from New Zulland. He is always interested in online channels for recruitment and does an amazing amount of recruitment using methods “other than job boards”. If you want to become a bleeding edge recruiter (social media, web 2.0, <insert buzz here>) he is the man to follow.

@DavidTalamelli – Principal Recruiter at Oracle – David is in charge of Oracle Recruitment in the Asia Pacific Region. He blogs regularly at Jobs at Oracle and is a good example of a senior HR professional on Twitter.

@RachBeebs – Account Manager at The Face in Brisbane. She is well connected in the employer branding space and is a must-read tweeter on employer branding and digital advertising.

@OneSteelGrads – One of the most organised grad teams on twitter. One Steel grads is a great example of using a twitter account for graduate interaction and attraction.

@SKMGraduate – A novel approach and a great idea. A random graduate from SKM regularly posts about his life as an engineering graduate. A great employer brand exercise. Brainchild of @jaredwoods.

@GradConnection, @MikeCasey, @DanPurchas, @DaveJenkins, @TimWattsNZ, @RJCMilne– that’s us!

I intend this to be a running list, in that if you are new to twitter, or would like to suggest yourself or someone else please feel free to contact me (@MikeCasey).

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

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!

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?