Where do new/soon to be graduates look for jobs?

michaels

Where I work we used to contact uni careers service and would get 100 applications of which about a dozen might be suitable for interview, not we get 2 or 3. Salaries remain competitive. It is not a huge company who can rely on name recognition or a huge social media budget.

So how to reach graduates and those soon to graduate in numerate subjects? Sadly it is too long since I was a student and my kids are not at that stage yet.

tacpot12

Not sure I know the answer to your question, but as far as I know graduates use the same job search sites as everyone else, and search for graduate positions. You could advertise on such sites, but I suspect you would be overwhelmed with applications, so you perhaps need to approach a recruitment agency that has experience of placing new graduates in jobs. There must be such agencies.

Also, can the Uni careers service not tell you what sites/services they refer their graduates to?

Lokolo

Milkround was one I used (about 8 years ago now). However now there won't be many at all. Most start advertising to final year students around Sept-Nov.

I had two job offers before Christmas in my final year.

If people have left it to now to apply (and they've just graduated), then they're about 9 months too late, or not the right candidates.

When do you advertise?

Owain_Moneysaver

Are you contacting the right universities?

No point restricting yourself to your local uni if they have a very weak presence in the subjects you want.

Also look at student sites like studentroom and employment sites like glassdoor. Improving your visibility on those shouldn't be expensive.

michaels

Thanks all for your comments. It is hard for us to stand out on milkround as we are a niche player in an industry with some much larger although less specialised employers but we typically look for 1 or 2 grads a year not hundreds and we just don't have the name recognition. As pointed out we are also ideally looking for people available now so won't get the career focused who sorted everything out before christmas.

A lot of the courses/unis we traditionally recruited from now have very few uk nationals (which doesn't matter to us but does to our bigger customers) hence having to cast the net wider.

agrinnall

michaels wrote: »

A lot of the courses/unis we traditionally recruited from now have very few uk nationals (which doesn't matter to us but does to our bigger customers) hence having to cast the net wider.

Why should your customers care what nationality your employees are? Do you have a lot of racist/xenophobic customers?

silvercar

michaels wrote: »

Thanks all for your comments. It is hard for us to stand out on milkround as we are a niche player in an industry with some much larger although less specialised employers but we typically look for 1 or 2 grads a year not hundreds and we just don't have the name recognition. As pointed out we are also ideally looking for people available now so won't get the career focused who sorted everything out before christmas.

You could be ideally placed to pick up graduates with one years experience, who picked the wrong job initially.

michaels

agrinnall wrote: »

Why should your customers care what nationality your employees are? Do you have a lot of racist/xenophobic customers?

Not at all, it is an administrative issue.

michaels

silvercar wrote: »

You could be ideally placed to pick up graduates with one years experience, who picked the wrong job initially.

And that has happened in the past on several occasions but it is a matter of knowing where such people would look for a new job. It would be frowned upon if we poached those we came across whilst doing our job.

A_Nice_Englishman

It has been said that a lot of jobs aren't advertised at all and recruitment is by word of mouth. Do your existing graduate employees keep in touch with those they studied with and hear about any looking for a new job? Do they spread the word about what a great place yours is to work in?

Lokolo

michaels wrote: »

Thanks all for your comments. It is hard for us to stand out on milkround as we are a niche player in an industry with some much larger although less specialised employers but we typically look for 1 or 2 grads a year not hundreds and we just don't have the name recognition. As pointed out we are also ideally looking for people available now so won't get the career focused who sorted everything out before christmas.

A lot of the courses/unis we traditionally recruited from now have very few uk nationals (which doesn't matter to us but does to our bigger customers) hence having to cast the net wider.

What sort of job role is this?

It's a shame the uni careers office are only producing a few candidate CVs. Are you quite picky with the universities that you are going to?

I came from an ex-poly and was 1 of 3 IT candidates hired. They had a lot of applications (50 or so), and had 7 at the interview (meant to be 8). The next year they said they would only accept candidates from red brick / oxbridge type, they received only a handful of applications and actually didn't hire any of them. The students that go to these top universities will only be applying for top named companies, the HR department failed to see this.

Another thing you could try is hiring for end of 1st/2nd year for a summer
8 week placement. This may give you a wider pool as you can test the waters with these students so to speak. But if you are really small I guess it might be too expensive to do this.