Graduate Recruitment Blog

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.

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.

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