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.

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.

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.

The AAGE Conference 2009

The annual AAGE conference (The Australian Association of Graduate Employers) is happening in Sydney next week between the 11^th and 13^th of November with graduate employers from all over Australia attending to share their thoughts about the state and future of graduate recruitment in Australia.

Paul Russell the AAGE Director and Chair and Ben Reeves the AAGE CEO will officially kick off the 3 days of the conference that will consist of workshops and presentations by members of the AAGE Committee, industry suppliers and other international graduate recruitment experts at the Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney. The conference covers a wide variety of topics ranging from how to attract graduates to your organsiation’s program, assessment and selection techniques and how to develop, engage and retain graduates once they have joined your graduate program. You can check out more information about the conference sessions on the AAGE Conference Program.

GradConnection at the AAGE

One thing that the GradConnection team is looking forward to is hearing about the High Flier’s graduate statistics from the past 12 months as well as future forecasts on how 2010 is shaping up. We’ll also be manning the GradConnection Exhibitor stand where we will be providing a sneak peak of some of the statistics that graduate job hunting visitors to our site have provided us throughout this year, so make sure you stop by and pick up a copy for yourself.

The After Party

Aside from all of the learning opportunities at the AAGE conference, there is a great set of social events over the three days, the highlight of which (and this is a completely unbiased view) will be the Gala Dinner After party which coincidentally is hosted by us this year. The venue is the 47^th story of the Australia Square tower building, the Orbit Bar. The theme is based around an Oscars after party seeing as the Graduate Recruitment Industry awards are announced earlier in the evening. Stop by our expo stand to pick up an invite with a map to the venue from the Gala Dinner. We have to give a big shout out to Ainsley from OneSteel for helping us to organize the night.

The AAGE Conference After Party at the Summit Bar

If you are attending the AAGE conference next week, make sure you come by our stand and say hi. There are no excuses – you can’t miss the stand – and we’ll also see you at the After Party!

For more information on the AAGE Conference check out the AAGE site at: www.aage.com.au

GradConnection – Home of the GradMaker

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

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.

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