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5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know

Team Prosple

Prosple’s Grant Robson and Sam McDonald talk through the latest industry trends we’re seeing and why graduate recruitment in Australia and New Zealand has quickly flipped into a ‘candidates market’.

Fewer students, applying for fewer jobs

In 2021 we started to see a decrease in the number of students enrolling at university, and students completing their degrees. This resulted in a 2.5% year on year decrease in graduates completing their degree in comparison with the previous year.

5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know - Course Completions

Since 2016, the amount of domestic students within Australia has hardly increased at all. Almost all the growth within universities has come from international students. This could indicate that Australia has reached a saturation point of its university enrolments, possibly capping the supply of graduates. This is also evident in course enrollments, which declined in 2020 in comparison to 2019.

5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know - Course commencement growth rate

On top of that, we’ve seen a trend where students are applying for fewer jobs. There could be a number of reasons as to why this is the case, and we haven’t yet put our finger on exactly why. Our early hypothesis is that students are recognizing that it's a candidates' market and therefore they are being more selective when applying for jobs.

5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know - Application rate per student

More employers hiring graduates

Over the past year, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of employers hiring graduates. For context, each year Prosple compiles the Top 100 graduate employers in each country. As part of our research, we develop an exhaustive list of all the employers who have hired students in the last 12 months, searching across our own platforms and other job boards. In 2020 there were 572 graduate employers in Australia, and 246 in New Zealand. In 2021 this had increased to 796 Australian graduate employers and 514 New Zealand graduate employers.

5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know - Number of Top 100 nominated employers
Not only are there more employers hiring graduates, graduate employers have also upped their intakes, with 56% of employers hiring more graduates than in previous years. This has lead to a huge increase in the number of opportunities available to students, which means that we’re now in a candidates market we spoke of earlier.

Money matters to Gen Z

Interestingly, we’re seeing that salary is becoming an important factor for Gen Zers when making career decisions. As part of the AAGE Candidate Surveys', students are asked “Why did you decline an offer/s?”. In 2018, ‘salary’ was the sixth most important factor for students behind ‘Quality of work’ and ‘Career progression'. However, in 2021, ‘salary’ rated the second most important factor in students selecting which employer they were going to work for.

 

This is a trend we’re seeing globally. Sarah Weise from Bixa research recently completed a study on what matters most to Gen Z. In summary, Sarah and her team found that Gen Z was very money savvy and salary motivated. This is different from previous generations that they have previously done studies on, like millennials who search for purpose-driven workplaces.

Students are feeling less prepared in their job search

Unfortunately, we’re finding that students are feeling less prepared when they begin their job search. When students were asked “to what extent did your university prepare you extremely well for your job search, only 6% of students said they felt well prepared.

5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know - Survey

One contributing factor might be that students are, in general, less engaged now than they have been in previous years. Students participating in the AAGE Candidate Survey were asked “which of the following activities have you experienced in your time at uni?”. As you can see in the below graph, there’s a steady decrease in students participating in activities like vacation programs and internships.

5 long term trends that every graduate employer should know - Vacation programs and internships student participation rate

Employers are rethinking their recruitment processes

As we are now in a candidate market, employers are being forced to rethink their recruitment processes to attract a broader range of candidates. Whilst we don’t have all the answers here at Prosple, we have a few suggestions based on what we’re seeing in the market.

Shorten the recruitment process

In our recent user testing, we’re finding that students are feeling frustrated by how long the recruitment process takes. The path to a job for a graduate is a long and tough road, with psychometric testing, assessment centres and interviews spanning over months in some cases. We think there’s a big opportunity for employers to simplify the recruitment process which makes it a better candidate experience, and will help in attracting top talent.

Increase the salary for your graduate positions

As we could see in the AAGE Candidate Survey data, Gen Zers are more motivated by money than previous generations. Of course, this will vary between individuals, but overall there’s certainly a trend here.

Not sure how you compare to other organisations when it comes to salary? Download our free salary guide today.

Expand your candidate pool

There’s a huge opportunity for employers to broaden their horizons and open up recruitment to more diverse candidates. Look into how your organization can recruit from TAFE’s, Alternative education pathways like General Assembly, hiring from MOOCs and so on. What about international students? Whilst the recent pandemic decreased the supply of international students studying in Australia & New Zealand, there’s still a highly-skilled workforce eager for opportunities that we can tap into. 

Highlight career progression and on the job learning and development

As per the 2022 AAGE Candidate Survey, we can see that students still say that the opportunity for career progression and the quality of the training & development program are still the two most important joining factors.

What does your learning and development program look like? What does the general career path look like for a graduate within your organisation? Clearly stating this in all of your job postings and employer branding efforts is a quick win, and an easy way to highlight what matters most to students.

Summary

We understand that this is a challenging time for employers. There’s been a huge shift in the graduate recruitment market, where it's been flipped on its head within a matter of a few years and it's gone from being an employer market to a candidate market where students are now in the driver's seat and are making more selective, thought through career decisions. Whilst we don’t have all the answers at Prosple, we are working hard with universities, students and employers to understand what this all means and how we can continue to connect students with employers.

If your organisation is looking to increase its employer branding to attract more applications, book a strategy session with one of our Graduate Attraction Consultants today.

Interested in attracting the
right graduate talent? Get in touch with us.

The slide deck and the webinar

Visualisations of all data discussed are available in this slide deck that was shared in the webinar:

Download slides

To watch the webinar in full, click the video below!