Graduate Recruitment Blog

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.

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

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