GCCA | Graduate Careers Council of Australia

Graduate Careers Australia

ergo - Number 87 June 2002

Recruitment Innovation Lecture Series 2002

The inaugural Recruitment Innovation Lecture Series held in late April 2002, was the first in what is hoped to be an annual series presented by online recruitment consultants Catch22 Asia Pacific. The aim of the lectures is to provide expert insights into innovation and best practice in online recruitment, and this year’s address featured acclaimed US author and e-recruitment advisor Gerry Crispin, who took as the theme for his afternoon lecture “global trends and best-practice online campus recruitment programs”. In this address he discussed the impact of technological trends on graduate recruitment strategies in the United States, as well as examining what makes an e-recruitment strategy successful, providing up-to-the-minute examples.

The afternoon started with a welcome and background briefing from Catch22 director Elizabeth O’Leary, who explained the benefits of an international perspective of online graduate recruiting in an Australian market where the population is aging and new strategies are being employed to capture the interest of future graduates at an increasingly early age. Ms O’Leary also emphasised the need for employers to not only tackle branding issues but to become more proactive in seeking out potential employees with postgraduate degrees.

Employers Target Students Earlier

Gerry Crispin then began by speaking about the American experience in the past few months, stating that programs such as cooperative education and internships are becoming increasingly important to employers. Another important observation was that larger employers are attempting to pinpoint and attract the best talent from universities at an earlier stage than ever before, with around 50% of engineering graduates being hired before the second or third year of their degrees, and in some cases students being targeted while still in high school!

The Implications of Technology

Progressing to the main focus of his speech, technology, Crispin warned that it had now progressed to the point where university careers services could be completely excluded from the recruitment process if they are not able to add value to employers by providing data, communication strategies and insights into their student population. He commented that new technology is enabling employers to communicate with students directly through email or more commonly by accessing their personal websites (usually mandatory in the first year of study) to determine their character and potential. Crispin advised careers services to keep pace with this change, and to proactively define their own role in the technology-driven recruitment market place to come, perhaps as consultants for employers and ensuring equity in the process.

Crispin talked about the increased expectations of students for high production values in online recruitment tools, primarily the company website. He also emphasised that it was important to “deliver past the flash”, that is to make good on promises regarding employment conditions, as “Generation Y” particularly values this kind of truthful representation. As the US graduate job market is currently in a slump (43% down on May 2001), many graduates are going on to postgraduate study. However, Gerry noted that there is still hot demand for quality students with and many jobs on offer, the only real difference being that top students are only receiving 3 or 4 job offers rather than the 6 or 7 they were receiving a year ago!

Companies Influence Universities

The influence companies exert upon universities was also examined, including the recent phenomena of driving change in the demographic mix of students; however he stressed that employers also need to keep up with changes in student attitudes and behaviour. Many companies are also conducting focus groups on campus to determine how students perceive them.

Examining the websites of many large recruiters, Crispin remarked that almost half the content is developed specifically for university student recruiting. Here, observing the “three second rule” – what a visitor retains after three seconds of exposure to the site – is crucial, and branding critical, not to mention the importance of allowing candidates to “self-select”. Crispin espouses three rules for graduate recruitment, which are:

1. To always follow the job seeker
2. To build continuing relationships with students starting before they acquire the necessary skills, and
3. To evaluate the success of the process in bottom line business terms: how it adds to the profitability and sustainability of the company.

He also states that reform in the area of university careers services should begin with the rethinking of traditional mediation and referral roles, with more encouragement for companies to interact with students and the institution as a whole, and also in areas such as optimising web-based service delivery and supporting initiatives such as “virtual” careers fairs.

The afternoon concluded with a brief address from Roger Bartley, who thanked Gerry Crispin, spoke about the Vital Partnership Conference 2002 and finished by reiterating Crispin’s point that, as far as the development of graduate careers and the impact of new technology, the relative calm of mid-2002 merely meant the sector is currently “in the eye of the storm”.