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.

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

Within a few short weeks we will be replicating GradMaker in New Zealand though GradConnection New Zealand (GCNZ). GCNZ is set to launch the New Zealand version formally on December 1 in preperation for the NZ graduate recruitment season in 2010.

Keeping with the graduate theme, GCNZ has been setup by Tim Watts, previously a graduate from PWC and Rob Milne, a graduate from KPMG.

Graduate Programs in New Zealand are usually not as large and often do not follow the same formal timelines as they do in here in Australia. We are very eager to see GCNZ succeed in the New Zealand market and are anxious to see how our technology performs in a different market.

To keep up-to-date with the New Zealand graduate market, GCNZ is running a graduate recruitment blog similar to this one specifically about NZ.

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.