The Evolution of the Graduate Market

Just for a minute, close your eyes and imagine!

You have just started your Graduate Recruitment Campaign and over the next 6 weeks will receive hundreds, if not thousands of applications. You have forklifts! yes forklifts moving pallets of paper based applications from the mail delivery centre to your office on a daily basis. Your office has become a temporary warehouse in the back of the building because of the space required for all these pallets.

To compound the issue, your HR Graduate Team consists of 8 contracted Microsoft Excel specialists who will need to manually register each application and type in the most important details such as personal, academic qualifications, grade point averages and any specifics relating to the graduate positions that might be of assistance.

Over the next few weeks whilst this team manually sorts through the myriad of paper (another lost forest!) , the team manually communicates with candidates using well designed database letter mail-outs for every one of the 5000 applicants, as well as individually calling the successful candidates to progress them through the various stages of your selection process. 100s of calls, and in most cases 100 more because the candidate couldn't be reached the first time!

Open your eyes, this isn't just any made up fairytale but the reality of Graduate recruiters in the 80's and 90's before the amazing revolution known as Automatic Tracking Systems (ATS) or e-recruitment system that arrived in the late 90's.

So what has changed and what has stayed the same over the last 10 years?

Well for those of us who were young enough to remember the pallets of applications coming through, and for those of us who met with the e-recruitment pioneers which in Australia included the great founders from NGA.NET and PageUp People we listened to their innovative solutions and their promise in disbelief.

What no more pallets of CV's, no more administrative teams working all hours typing Excel spreadsheets that we could merge our Microsoft Word documents with to create mail-outs for rejected and successful candidates at each stage of the process.

What would we do with ourselves and all this extra time?

The introduction of e-recruitment capability has enabled the graduate industry to streamline our selection process with fewer resources, improve candidate care, promote our brands and turnaround responses and offers faster than Ben Johnson running the 100 metre sprint on steroids.

Think of the power of being a system administrator! At the push of a button you can reject thousands of applications and tell candidates via sms that they have been rejected! Hopefully you will be getting more joy out of advising the successful candidates!

Our graduate teams have been able to leverage the technology to build detailed online profiles of their ideal graduate linked to corporate competencies and behaviors using online profiling devices (psychometric tests), phone screens, personality and motivational testing and a range assessment centres and behavioral interviews. The revolutionary e-recruitment systems have enabled us to not only store all of this data centrally, but to also improve our response and turnaround time with the use of online booking schedules and sms messaging to remind graduates of key dates or to even communicate simple messages about our programs.

Are you providing detailed feedback to candidates at every stage of your selection process? You should be! Your system allows you to.

So it's 2009, we have or are all grappling with our Facebook, Google Group or some maybe even looking at Second Life strategies, but ultimately from a branding and selection perspective our aim is to drive traffic (applications!) to our well branded corporate websites that are underpinned by the amazing ability of our e-recruitment systems.

You might just stop for another minute and wonder, what will your 2015 Graduate campaign look like?

For more information on how to add value to your attraction and selection strategies please contact Fusion Graduate Management Solutions at info@fusiongms.com.au