Graduate Recruitment Blog

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

Nearly half of Australian Graduates will have a bad experience on a graduate website.

It came as a bit of a shock to us, but some Australian Graduate Program Websites we have seen over the past year don’t seem to work well in many of today’s popular website browsers. These websites can either look bad, or simply not work in Firefox, Safari and others  (which make up nearly half of Australian graduate traffic).

What is website browser optimisation?

To start off lets cover what browse optimisation means. In a nutshell, web browser optimisation involves making sure that your graduate recruitment web page is displayed correctly in the different web browsers used by graduates today. I thought that this topic is worth a blog post because these days an organisations website is fast becoming the most valuable marketing tool in the arsenal of generating graduate job applications. Once you’ve done the hard yards to attract graduates to your site through careers fairs and on campus presentations you don’t want to scare them off because they think your website is broken.

So how do you check your graduate website works?

To test whether or not your site is being displayed properly to your graduate job hunters you can cover most of your bases by simply visiting your site in the web browsers and checking them out for yourself:

Microsoft Internet Explorer

This browser comes by default with windows operating systems and most corporates and many universities will provide this as their standard web browser. There are a wide variety of versions for this browser the most common being versions 6.0 and 7.0. Version 8.0 has just been released and more users will slowly move to this newer version.

Mozilla Firefox

This is a popular browser that many users are migrating to on Windows, Linux and Mac. You can download a copy here.

Safari

This browser comes standard with an Apple computer. With the large amount of Apple fans out there this is becoming quite a popular browser and it is used when browsing the web from and iPhone as well. You can download a copy here

You may need to try some of these browsers at home as you may not have the security permissions you need in the office.

Why is it important to run these tests?

Most websites are optimised for the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser as it comes by default with the windows operating system. This is due to Internet Explorer having the majority of internet users historically.

Over the past two months we’ve had around 30,000 graduates come to our website to view potential graduate employers and we’ve found that there has been a substantial shift away from Internet Explorer as the standard web browser used by graduates; you can see the breakdown of our traffic in the table below:

Browser	% of Graduate users
Microsoft Internet Explorer	52%
Mozilla Firefox	37%
Safari	6%
Other	5%

We’ve seen a wide variety of different employers graduate websites that have had issues when viewed in different browsers and you can see that close to 50% of graduate job hunters are using a different browser than the ‘standard’ Internet Explorer.

This in contrast of total market share, where Microsoft Internet Explorer enjoys a market share of 66% (hitslink.com).

Optimise your graduate website for all major web browsers!

From the statistics we have generated, it is clear that nearly half of all Australian Graduates use a web browser other than Internet Explorer. This is well above the internet industry standard for browser use probably due to the fact that Australian Graduates are extremely technology Savy in comparison with general internet users.  We strongly recommend that you check your website, especially if it is older, to see how it performs under other browsers. We have heard of several websites that have become a major barrier-to-entry for graduates looking for jobs.

All website designers now create websites that adhere to industry standards, so if you decide your website needs re-development, you could get the majority of this covered for around $5000. We can happily point you in the direction of a few great website designers if required.

Let me know if you have any more questions about this topic, hopefully it helps you catch any issues on your grad site in the future.