Graduate Careers Australia
The Graduate Grapevine - Number 2, December 2005
Graduate Recruitment: Successful and Growing
A new survey conducted by Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) suggests that the majority of graduate employers are happy with the success of their 2005 recruitment campaign, with a large proportion of employers planning to increase the size of their graduate intake for 2006.
The report, Graduate Outlook 2005, is based on a survey of graduate employers from various industries across Australia. The 2005 report is based on the responses from 70 employers.
Graduate Recruitment in 2005 and 2006
The size of an organisation appears to have an impact on both the number of applications received from graduates by employers, along with the calibre of candidates.
Of graduate employers in larger organisations, 84.8 per cent rated the number of applications received and the calibre of their candidates from their recruitment campaign as good or excellent; compared with 61.9 per cent, and 71.4 per cent respectively of smaller organisations. However, despite these differences, similar proportions of large and small organisations rated the overall success of their 2005 campaign as good or excellent (82.6 per cent compared with 81.0 per cent). Overall, only three per cent of organisations described the success of the 2005 graduate recruitment campaign as poor.
A third of all employers stated that they would have employed more graduates in 2005 if a higher number of appropriate candidates had been available. When examined by industry, we see that over 40 per cent of participating employers from the Accounting/Finance and Construction/Mining/Engineering industries would have employed more graduates in 2005 had more appropriate candidates had been available.
Overall, just under 50 per cent of employers (49.3 per cent) stated that they had some trouble sourcing candidates from particular disciplines. Not surprisingly (given the shortages mentioned above), when examined by broad education disciplines, larger shortages were reported in the fields of Accounting/Economics/Econometrics and Engineering/Surveying (33.3 per cent and 36.4 per cent respectively).
The survey indicates that the recruitment of non Australian resident graduates should increase in future years. While 15.7 per cent of graduate employers currently recruit international graduates whose permanent residence status was pending, or through a sponsored work permit arrangement, over a third of all employers (35.3 per cent) stated that they intend to recruit them in the future.
Of graduate employers, 91.0 per cent felt they would be either increasing or maintaining the numbers in their graduate intake for 2006 relative to 2005 (40.3 per cent increasing, 50.7 per cent recruiting the same number of graduates). However, over a third of employers feel it will be more difficult to meet their recruitment targets in 2006 than it was in 2005.
A full copy of the report is available free of charge on the website: www.graduatecareers.com.au, under Professional Resources/Employer Resource Centre.
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