Graduate jobs

Graduate recruitment and Covid 19


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Graduates are essential to an organisation’s talent pipeline. Employers appreciate that recruiting the best and the brightest young people brings enormous benefits for their business.

There is no doubt the hiring landscape has been changed by Covid-19. However, top companies still have to work hard to attract this new cohort of talent. Employer branding remains a vital tool in achieving this. Graduates want to know and understand more about the employer, their work culture, and their values before they commit to them and sign on the dotted line.

Whereas traditionally employers would go on campus and enjoy face-to-face time with graduates. Now, they are having to up their digital game and enhance their virtual graduate programmes. Many forward-thinking recruiters have already reconfigured their online recruitment to create a smoother, faster application process for graduates. Equally, graduates need to ensure that they are spending plenty of time online to research organisations and assess which ones they want to apply to for a graduate position.

Nevertheless, jobs for graduates are not immune to the impact of the pandemic. Our most recent figures for graduate jobs from July show a 56% decrease in graduate vacancies compared to the same month last year. That said, many of the big graduate recruitment programmes don’t launch until the Autumn so that figure may soften somewhat, an example is ESB who are about to launch their graduate recruitment programme on the 24th September and is open to applicants until the 2nd of November.

While July 2020 showed a decrease in the share of graduate jobs in industries such as accountancy and finance and banking, financial services, and insurance, we have seen a shift in the industries recruiting graduates with companies in construction, engineering and production now leading the way. Jobs for graduates in construction are up 15%; in engineering & Utilities they are up 7%, and Production and Manufacturing graduate jobs are up 3% compared to 12 months ago.   It will be interesting to see whether this year’s CAO points reflect this reorientation in demand for graduates.

There is no doubt this is a challenging time for organisations; however many firms recognise the importance of keeping their talent pipeline flowing and graduate recruitment will remain a vital component in their ongoing recruitment strategy.

This insight was provided by Jane Lorigan, CEO Saongroup, the parent company of IrishJobs.ie to the Irish Times for their report on graduate recruitment and Covid-19.