Graduate Recruitment Blog

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

A couple of weeks back I was contacted by someone from a new niche job board called Ethical Jobs who have recently completed a study looking into how motivated people are to work for organisations with a heavy focus on ethics in the way that they operate.

The Ethical Jobs Survey

According to the website an ethical job is a position with an organisation where your position or the organisation is actively contributing to a more equitable, more just or more sustainable world.

The ethical jobs survey found applicants to non-profit organisations are willing to take a significant pay cut. 60 not for profit employers were surveyed and some of the most interesting findings were the following:

• 56 per cent said applicants are willing to work for 10-20 per cent less;
• 19 per cent said applicants are willing to work for 20-30 per cent less;
• 6 per cent said applicants are willing to work for more than 30 per cent less.

Making the world a better place is a strong motivation to join a non profit organisation or an organisation that promotes ethical business practices. Michael Cebon, the found of Ethical jobs.com.au says “Increasingly people are willing to put things they believe in above money, and making the world a better place is as strong a motivation as you’ll find.” 87 per cent of employers surveyed said job seekers were more likely to apply for a position seen to be ethical.

Ethics and graduates

The research conducted by ethical jobs is a good indicator that people do seem to care about how ethical their employer is. It might be beneficial for you to do a bit of research about some of the ethical practices that your organisation has in order to promote these aspects as part of your graduate program marketing as there are potentially a huge range of activities your organisation may participate in that can provide graduates researching your organisation with some unique insights.

This year on the GradConnection website we have had just over 4800 responses from Australia graduates outlining a few organisational values that are important to them with 47% of these graduates saying Environmental sustainability being important as well as 35% saying they value an employer that contributes back to the community.

The Verdict

The Ethical Jobs site is a cool concept which seems to have a lot of potential and it might be a good avenue for graduate job hunters and graduate employers to connect with each other with the added benefit that each party knows at least a little bit about each other due to the nature of the website. You can read about the founders of the site on their about us page here. If any of you out there have had any experiences using the site or have some views on ethical jobs post up a comment.

I ended up being a bit under the weather last week so the blog post from last week is now this weeks blog post.

While I was off work recuperating, I started thinking again about our very first blog post which looked at the most popular location for graduate jobs in Australia. Our very first blog post was about how Melbourne was the most attractive city for graduate job hunters and re-reading it over the week got me thinking about how ready Australian graduates are to relocate for their first graduate job on leaving university.

From that first blog post we found that 55% of graduate job hunters were interested in Melbourne as a place to take up their first graduate position. This fact gets even more interesting when you consider that only 30% of the visitors to our site were actually based in Melbourne to begin with.

Relocate? Sure why not

To take things a step further I thought it would be interesting to have a look at how many graduates were interested in relocating to multiple cities after they had finished up at university, so as you do when you’re sick, I ended up sitting down and hitting our database to see how many graduates were interested in relocating to secure their first graduate job and the results were as follows:

Relocation Locations	% of Graduate Respondents
3	39.5%
2	16.5%
1	44%

The Breakdown

This is an interesting insight into the attitude of graduates as they are searching for their first graduate job as it shows 3 distinct mindsets.

Firstly there are the 44% of grads who only want to work in one location after they finish their university studies. My thinking on this is that these graduates either want to work and live in their home town or the town they have relocated to for university.

The next group which accounts for 16% of graduates are interested in moving to 2 locations. I think this shows that these graduates have relocated for university and would want to either stay where they are studying or return to their home town.

The remaining 39% of graduates are out to work in 3 or more locations after they finish studying which shows that a large proportion of graduates coming out of university in Australia are very flexible and are keen to do whatever it takes to find a good opportunity. I think this is the group I would have fallen into when I finished studying at university as I was keen to move anywhere  I could secure an opportunity, I even considered going to Norway at one point.

Summing Up

So it seems that the majority of Australian graduates, 56% to be precise, are motivated to relocate once they finish studying which is a good sign for locations such as Western Australia, Queensland and Canberra as these centres do have a high demand for graduates but don’t’ have the largest numbers of graduates studying there compared to Sydney and Melbourne.

This week I was reading a story published on News.com.au about how difficult graduate jobs have been to find this year in Australia compared to a year ago. The sectors the article outlines as being hardest hit have been Accounting, Finance and Mining, with graduate job hunters now being lucky to receive a single job offer this year as opposed to potentially having multiple offers in these sectors in the previous few years.

This got me thinking about the state of the graduate jobs market in other areas of the world and the biggest market that popped into my mind to investigate was China.

The state of the Graduate Jobs Market in China

The scale of Graduate Job hunters in China is just immense. There are approximately 6 million graduates finishing university every year making it extremely competitive amongst Chinese graduates fighting for a declining number of graduate jobs. The Chinese government has been implementing an initiative to increase the levels of education of the Chinese people however their economy is still largely focused around manufacturing which combined with the economic downturn is making it hard for graduates leaving university to find work.

Things sound like they are going to be getting more difficult for Chinese graduates in years to come as well. On top of there being 6 million new graduates finishing university each year, there is a hangover of 1 million graduates from the previous year who still have not found work, as well as another 3 million graduates from years before still looking for work. An article from the Wall Street Journal shows that in the last 10 years there has been an increase in the number of Chinese university students of about 1 – 2 million per year so the shortage of graduate positions is likely to grow. The growth in student numbers is also proving to be a problem as faculties are not growing at the same speed making it more difficult to provide a high level of education to the increased student base.

Some Strange Hurdles for Chinese Graduate Job Hunters…

Some of the requirements for a graduate job in China can also be challenging. One conversation at a careers fair for a graduate technology sales role had a sign posted next to the stand outlining a height requirement of 172cm for men and 162cm for women in order to be eligible for the position. The sign also stated that applicants must be ‘attractive’. When a graduate approached the company representative he was then asked ‘how much can you drink’ as drinking in the sales process is very important in Chinese culture. The interested graduate then said ‘well I can drink 3 or 4 beers in a sitting no problem’ to which the company representative replied ‘I’m not interested in how many beers you can drink, I’m talking hard liquor here’.

Chinese Government Graduate Jobs

Due to the shortage of positions there has also been a huge increase in the number of applications to work for the Chinese Government and by increase I mean there have been an additional 130,000 applications made by graduates bringing the total number of applications to 775,000 in 2008. These applications have been made for only 13,500 graduate jobs so there is only 1 job per 60 or so applicants.

So in short the global economy is making things tough in Australia for Graduate Job hunters but spare a thought for the millions of Chinese grads struggling to find work over the next few years. Check out the video below if you can for some extra info on the subject provided by the Guardian newspaper.

GradConnection