Graduate Recruitment Blog

It’s always hard to comprehend the size of the internet when you can’t physically see who’s online as opposed to seeing exactly who’s in front of you at the checkout in the supermarket, but it’s becoming more and more transparent with all the measurement tools out there such as Google Analytics and our favourite at GradConnection: Woopra. The main difference between the two is that Google Analytics will show you the history of traffic on your site vs Woopra which will show you the users currently on your site, it’s the difference between looking at the daily report of total customers a store manager at Coles and actually watching the customers in the store as they shop and seeing how they behave.

It’s often a challenge for us to visually portray the total amount of visitors we get on any one day, week or month to our site, the best we can do is say a number but just a number is hard to put into  perspective. Being at the John Mayer concert (which rocked by the way!) the other night in the sold out Rod Laver arena of 13,000 made me think, “so that’s what 13,000 people look like”. Being that we’re always checking the GradConnection site analytics I knew in my head that this equates to under a week’s worth of traffic to GradConnection.com.au and about 2 hours of traffic to our friends who we share an office with Bart and Kim’s American retail coupon site tjoos.com.

Graduate Careers Site Performance

Often we find that organisations career or graduate career sites go unmeasured and it’s simply just the measurement of applications along with quoting where the candidate first heard about the employer that give the metrics on the site’s performance. Simply putting Google Analyitics into your organisation or graduate careers site will show you exactly where your traffic is coming from and will allow you to give real measurements on the numbers coming through to your site, such as:

• Where Visitors are coming from – Referring Sites, Google, Direct
• Most popular pages – You’ll be surprised to see it’s not always the home page
• What parts of the world your visitors are from – Break this down again into cities
• Bounce rate – Are they finding you and leaving? Or are they hanging around?

This is only the tip of the iceberg on what Google Analytics can show you, if you’re anything like us you could spend days playing around in there.

Grasping the total visitors

When you’re looking at just the numbers it’s hard to put in perspective exactly how many people that is and what that amount of people would look like, whether you’re looking at a good day for us being 3,000 coming to our site vs a good day for tjoos.com being over 50,000. The best way for me to put this into a visual perspective is to think of the number of people I could see at the John Mayer concert and think over the past week we’ve had more visitors than a sold out John Mayer concert.

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

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

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.