There really are jobs for graduates

Communication and the ease of it today is great but it has a huge downside. There has been so much doom and gloom, reports dominated by redundancies and companies going out of business that this has affected the new graduate workforce of the UK. They believe there are no jobs so they are not job hunting - so instead even more are going travelling or taking up post graduate study.

The rationale being that come 2010 – when they return to the job market things will be better when it comes to jobs. But this is just not the case.

So many finalists are not applying that many of the big firms still have vacanies to fill – so there are jobs out there now! Taking on the costs of a post graduate degree just to put off job huting is an expensive mistake.  Employers wants graduates with real world, work based skills not more academic knowledge. And come 2010 there will be another 300,000 graduates leaving University to compete against for jobs. 

So what’s the message? If I were a finalist today or a graduate from last year, knowing what I know, I would apply to as many companies as I could and if I did not secure the job I want this summer, I would get work experience and apply again for next year – as that work experience will help me stand out for the rest.

Why does the BBC think graduates are stupid?

The BBC today (Sat 28th Feb) ran an article about there being too many graduates for the jobs available. That the ‘mickey mouse’ degrees are worth nothing. The truth is employers care less and less about the degree subject itself and indeed the University itself but rather focus on recruiting graduates based on the skills they have.

With this well worn debate no-one ever seems to consider the students themselves and their awareness of the whole situation. Undergraduates across the UK are hugely conscious of how tough the graduate market is and are developing the real world skills they need to maximise their chances of getting a graduate job.
The BBC &  media in general must stop talking about graduates as if they were small children in need of looking after and recognise that huge numbers of them are taking personal responsibility for what happens to them after University.

Increased applications for some, means retention issues for the future?

With many of the investment banks and others sectors reducing their graduate recruitment or not recruiting at all – other companies and sectors are clearly benefiting with increased, quality applications. (And who says undergraduates aren’t aware of what is going on in the world around them?!) But being the pessimistic culture we are, many are now talking about this only storing up retention issues for the future; the rationale being when the economy picks up again – as it inevitably will (and what will Robert Peston have to talk about then?!) – then all those graduates who joined ‘2nd choice’ sectors and companies will leave.

Instead I say see this as an opportunity, as a ‘2nd choice’ employer to become a permanent 1st choice employer. Do a great job with the graduates who you do hire in 2009 and then use their success stories in your recruitment in 2010, 2011 and beyond to become a permanent 1st choice employer! Get your graduates to be open and honest about what they had initially planned to do and then go on to show how much they have developed as a result of the company they joined.

There is always opportunity to be found as long as we are always looking for it!

A quick thought about talent

Graduate recruitment has become obsessed with ‘talent’ and me included. The top recruiters all want talent and only talent! A recent article in managament today got me thinking about this. One of the points they were making is that to survive the current economic climate we all need to be positive. Our attitude will help us get out of the economic downturn faster. But if we are busy saying we only want talent that implies many do not have talent.  Keep spreading that message and many may give up or stop trying. And right now we need everyone trying and striving. So perhaps we as graduate recruiters to do our bit for the global economy need to be saying we want ‘talent that fits’..rather than blindly obsessing about talent?!

Graduate Recruiters are too busy being busy…

Every graduate recruiter would agree that the advent of online tools have revolutionised graduate recruitment (as it has most industries) You can now communicate your message to huge audiences and as a result generate large volumes of applications with much less money than you used to. This however has a downside, it creates more applications which means more resource taken up dealing with the applications, crunching the data and trying to make sense of it all (not to mention all these new job boards springing up offering essentailly more of the same i.e. more mass email traffic)

Meanwhile students, especially finalists, are receiving greater and greater volumes of emails from would-be employers saying ‘we are great come and work for us’ – so much so they are deleting most of it without reading it and very importantly then looking for other ways to get the information they want. This other way, more and more, is through talking to real people from the business. Students want to spend time talking to employers and their graduates.

But here lies the problem, graduate recruiters are so busy dealing with applications, planning their online activity, crunching data and reporting on the status of the campaign they do not have the time to spend the additional time they need to in front of more students – despite the fact the students, their future employees, want to do this!

“Fewer, Better Applications” should not only be our mantra but also drive our actions. Graduate recruiters and their demanding bosses need to STOP and take a fundamental look at how they can attract & generate more of the very best and to my mind this means spending less time in the office playing with online activity and more time on in front of the ‘customers’ – the job hunting undergraduate!

Don’t just ‘Establishing Relationships’ with talent, get to know them!

When wanting to recruit the best talent, waiting for when individuals (in this case graduates) start looking for jobs is a big mistake. I have always believed the best undergraduate talent, by the time they get into their final year already know who they are going to apply to. They certainly don’t think “I wonder where I can find what consultancies or engineering companies there are for me to apply to?”! They know who they are already. So serious graduate recruiters must get ahead of the game. Find ways to target talent early. AND don’t just ‘build relationships’ with that talent, which for most means marketing your messages to them but find ways to get to know them and importantly their abilities (through such activities as on campus events, competitions, internships, part time work etc). Then identify who of those, based o n their abilities and ’fit’ you want to recruit and offer them jobs before they get into the final year.

Easy? ‘No’. But will it help you successfully compete for the very best talent? Yes it will!

Why too many graduate recruitment programmes don’t really deliver

Why do some many organisations (and a surprisingly large number of very big players) not really know why they recruit graduates. And don’t think ‘to develop future leaders’ is a good enough reason as it is not!

Only a small percentage of the graduates you recruit will become leaders in your organisation (but those who do will be truly excellent) however this alone would make it a very expensive programme on it’s own.  

So why should companies recruit graduates or perhaps a much better question is ‘what does the business need and can a graduate programme deliver on it?’ All businesses need not just future leaders, but talent at all levels and capable teams – graduates of all types and capabilities (and this cost) can be part of this and thus deliver. Graduates should no longer be seen as the just elite and ‘destined to rule’! A few may well do so but many are just keen to make an impact in their chosen field and role. Organisations can and should tap into these seem of talent and this deliver on projects, roles within the business. 

So, for example, in terms of roles and positions can become in the business: A few future leaders, true but also ‘leaders’ in their field / area of the business. And as these are quite long term companies also need to look at other measures of success (and not just retention, as that does not really measure the value the graduates and the programme delivers). So what else?

Some ideas might be…Are the graduates careers progressing faster than non-graduates? How are the projects they work on being measured and can these be then used to show value? I particularly like this one as you can dramatically speed up the return on investment using this method – we have a groundbreaking programme to deliver exactly this.

There is another key element to the ensuring your graduate programme delivers. Give them the skills today’s graduates need (and yes this will include letter writing, business email etiquette; it’s not their fault they have just never been shown!). Critical to the success of your graduate programme is to give them not just the standard skills (communication, influencing, managing etc) but also how to manage & drive their own careers, how to build networks etc. These will go along way to ensuring your graduate programme delivers.

Work Based Learning – ‘Fishing for themselves’

Much is being done now within Higher Education to help students be that bit better prepared for the world of work – which is a good thing. But at the moment too much is based on both telling them the skills that employers need – i.e. spoon feeding them what they need to know and encouraging them to gte more work experience.

Whereas to truly prepare them to succeed long term in the world of work they need to be armed with the ability to not just know what skills they need but assess which ones they have and to what level – i.e. learn to feed themselves.

Learning from their variety of work experiences is good example. However all too often it is ‘assumed’ that the students will learn fully for themselves the skills they have gleaned from their work experience. HE provide them with opportunities to get ‘work experience’ through placements and internships, thinking, or worst still assuming, that through that experience they will develop the skills they need for work. 

Students through no fault of their own don’t know what they don’t know – they need help and support to squeeze all the value possible from their different work experiences.

Higher Education is well placed to help stduents ‘reflect’ on their work experience and draw out all the skills they have got from their work experience. One such tool I have recently become involved in is ‘digital stories’ whereby the student concludes their reflection by actually contructing a story digitally, on their work experience and, all importantly, the skills they learned from it. This then means that when applying for jobs they are not just aware of all the relevant skills they have (and to what extent) but know how to demonstrate and verbalise them, which to date they have been pretty poor at.

Reflection then is a key skill and let’s hope to see more of that work being done in HE by academics and tutors with their students. Or put another way ”Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

Is HE failing to deliver what industry needs?

This was one of the topics of the expert panel at the recent AGR conference and a question answered by Bill Rammell in his interview with Carl Gilleard (CEO of the AGR).

My view is that HE is turning out what industry used to want, which is academic achievement i.e. graduates with 2.1s etc. But industry, like all customers, now wants more. They want bright graduates who also have skills that will make them ready for the world of work. And HE like all large organisations is a slow ship to turn.  But it is turning.

My criticism would be that the responsibility for that ‘change’ is being out upon a too smaller group – namely the Careers Services. Yes they have a role to play, but academics do too.

But the biggest and most important group that can and wants to ensure students are more ready for the world of work are the  students themselves. More needs to be done to put them in control of this issue - achieve this and many more students will leave University better prepared for the world of work, which is good for everyone.

How do you know when students are ready to learn?

Having run our Bright Futures ‘Time for Change’ national event and annual awards many things have struck me, one of which was their great quality talent and the other how keen they were all to learn.

There is a huge amount of research and work being done in Higher Education about students, the issue of employability and the fact that students focus on building their Cv and job hunting at so many different times during their time at University – and this then creates the challenge of identifying who those individuals are, especially for employers, so that the scarce resource available can be used to the greatest effect .

Too often students are given the ’employability message’ at times when they are just not listening. And anyone who works with students, especially those undergraduates who fall into Generation Y, should know is that they will do what they want to do when they want to do it – they really won’t be told! 

So who are listening?  Bright Futures committees and members are undergraduates who have made a conscious decision to join Bright Futures, and come from the 1st, 2nd and final year. They know getting a degree is no longer enough, they want to develop their skills and what to network with employers to ensure they apply to & ultimately join the right company – Bright Futures gives them all this. Our Bright Futures Societies are not just ready to learn but want to learn. And judging by the comments from the corporates who attended our event I know who they will invest their time in developing.