Graduate Recruitment

Graduate recruitment is the practice of only recruiting people who have graduated from university in certain professions and industries. Much of this is done in house through university career centres. The question is how good are such services? Research into graduate experience of such services seems to vary considerably, with some career services being very helpful and others of little use. Is using recruitment along with the word graduate a good thing or a bad thing? Using the word graduate in an advertisement may give colleagues a somewhat distorted view of the person who gets the job. Some people believe that nowadays a greater number of people attend university and the use of the word graduate in work advertisements is redundant. Some graduates are just as likely to be unemployed as non-graduates in the same field.

In some careers graduate recruitment is looked on as a way of moving certain staff up the ladder a lot more quickly. Some employers also believe that using the term graduate recruitment implies that they will get staff with the right type of skills. Certainly in industries that are based on engineering recruiting engineering graduates is a way of ensuring that staff have a certain level of qualification in that field. Thus graduate recruitment can mean that graduates have more of a foot on the ladder than non-graduates when it comes to career progression.

Sometimes a vacancy uses the term graduate recruitment and then settles for a non-graduate. Very often this is because the non-graduate may have greater actual work experience than the graduate. However, many non-graduates may not apply for vacancies that had graduate in the title. On the other hand, being a university graduate often implies that the person is more intelligent and has wider social experiences that could be useful to the company.

Graduates who use community blog sites such as my space might find that their profiles let them down. Employers are recognizing that some graduates use these sites for intellectual stimulation or for exchanging music and videos and some find that this prejudices them against graduate recruitment.

While using the term graduate recruitment may imply that a person will be using the skills they learned at university in the execution of their job, many graduates find that this is not the case. Some graduates say that unless they are employed in a niche market e.g. social work departments for graduates with a social work degree, then they do not use those skills. What graduates do find, is that they use skills such as team working and presentation which are often part of a degree course, more useful than their actual qualification.