HRreview is this week taking an in-depth look at graduate recruitment. 2015 saw a 13.2 percent increase in graduate vacancies and 3.7 percent rise in graduate starting salaries. But, it also saw some graduates struggling to find work after university. In some industries lowly paid, or even unpaid internships, are the quickest and easiest route into work. Controversial, and if unpaid potentially illegal, the internship has become a common factor in the lives of graduates in those first nervous days away from their alma mater.
2015 saw the relaxing of UCAS points as entry qualifiers in applications from big companies and only last week Penguin Random House announced that it would no longer ask for a graduate degree as a prerequisite for employment. The job market, in some industries, also improved last year, meaning some graduates could be luxuriously choosy about the job they accepted. 700 vacancies were left unfilled due to candidates rejecting job offers.
Over the next week we will be hearing from Dupsy Abiola, director of Intern Avenue, in an exclusive interview for HRreview. Dupsy quit her job as a leading barrister to create Intern Avenue, after seeing her sister struggle to find a job after university. She is a change-maker who views the unpaid internship as an outrage that should be stopped.
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Elizabeth Hunt, client marketing executive for youth recruitment job boards at Milkround and Milkround School Leavers will consider what the new year holds for graduate recruitment, while the CEO of Moorepay, Alison Dodd, will consider the make-up of graduate schemes.
The week will also see an in-depth interview with Bob Athwal who is director of the student experience at the University of Leicester. He will advise us to tamper with the human element of graduate recruitment at our peril. Finally, I will consider the impact internships are having on the UK’s creative industries and ask if they are making professions such as fashion and journalism a middle class only affair.
All that and more. We hope you enjoy it. We hope that you take something away from it that will benefit your business and better your approach to recruiting young talent in the years to come.
Robert joined the HRreview editorial team in October 2015. After graduating from the University of Salford in 2009 with a BA in Politics, Robert has spent several years working in print and online journalism in Manchester and London. In the past he has been part of editorial teams at Flux Magazine, Mondo*Arc Magazine and The Marine Professional.
- Robert Leeming
- Robert Leeming
- Robert Leeming
- Robert Leeming
