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.

It’s always hard to comprehend the size of the internet when you can’t physically see who’s online as opposed to seeing exactly who’s in front of you at the checkout in the supermarket, but it’s becoming more and more transparent with all the measurement tools out there such as Google Analytics and our favourite at GradConnection: Woopra. The main difference between the two is that Google Analytics will show you the history of traffic on your site vs Woopra which will show you the users currently on your site, it’s the difference between looking at the daily report of total customers a store manager at Coles and actually watching the customers in the store as they shop and seeing how they behave.

It’s often a challenge for us to visually portray the total amount of visitors we get on any one day, week or month to our site, the best we can do is say a number but just a number is hard to put into  perspective. Being at the John Mayer concert (which rocked by the way!) the other night in the sold out Rod Laver arena of 13,000 made me think, “so that’s what 13,000 people look like”. Being that we’re always checking the GradConnection site analytics I knew in my head that this equates to under a week’s worth of traffic to GradConnection.com.au and about 2 hours of traffic to our friends who we share an office with Bart and Kim’s American retail coupon site tjoos.com.

Graduate Careers Site Performance

Often we find that organisations career or graduate career sites go unmeasured and it’s simply just the measurement of applications along with quoting where the candidate first heard about the employer that give the metrics on the site’s performance. Simply putting Google Analyitics into your organisation or graduate careers site will show you exactly where your traffic is coming from and will allow you to give real measurements on the numbers coming through to your site, such as:

• Where Visitors are coming from – Referring Sites, Google, Direct
• Most popular pages – You’ll be surprised to see it’s not always the home page
• What parts of the world your visitors are from – Break this down again into cities
• Bounce rate – Are they finding you and leaving? Or are they hanging around?

This is only the tip of the iceberg on what Google Analytics can show you, if you’re anything like us you could spend days playing around in there.

Grasping the total visitors

When you’re looking at just the numbers it’s hard to put in perspective exactly how many people that is and what that amount of people would look like, whether you’re looking at a good day for us being 3,000 coming to our site vs a good day for tjoos.com being over 50,000. The best way for me to put this into a visual perspective is to think of the number of people I could see at the John Mayer concert and think over the past week we’ve had more visitors than a sold out John Mayer concert.

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.