17% cut in graduate vacancies for 2009

For any finalists who have yet to begin the process of finding a job, the going looks to be extremely tough.  A new study of graduate vacancies at Britain's top hundred graduate employers shows that this year's intake is being cut by 17% - and most of the positions have already been filled.

The report - ‘The Graduate Market in 2009', from High Fliers Research - also reveals that the number of new graduates taken on last year was nearly 18% less than employers had originally planned.  (At the AGR's annual conference last July, Trendence research had predicted an increase in graduate jobs of around 11.7% for 2008; in the event, graduate recruitment ended up some 6.7% down on 2007 levels).

And half of employers have already downgraded their graduate recruitment targets for the year, with cuts taking effect in virtually every sector.  Worst hit is the City, where positions in investment banking have been almost halved (down 47%), while the only bright spot is the public sector, where jobs have increased by half (51%) since 2007.  Sectors likely to recruit the most graduates this year are accountancy (20.9%), the public sector (13.5%) and the armed forces (12.8%), while among the students, investment banking, property and retail have all lost popularity in the graduate recruitment stakes.

Although the UK's top employers originally planned to take on over 40,000 graduates in 2008 and 2009, nearly 7,000 posts have now been cut or left unfilled.  And because the majority (two-thirds) of employers received significantly more applications for their graduate programmes this year than last, many of them have already filled all their vacancies or closed off their application processes.

It's not all gloom, however - although a third of employers have reduced their budgets for the 2008-9 graduate recruitment round, a fifth have actually increased their spending.  And the majority of graduate recruiters have continued to market their 2009 vacancies - typically at between 15 and 20 universities - using techniques such as careers fairs, campus presentations and local advertising,.

Despite the reduction in vacancies, starting salaries look set to increase by 5.9%, taking average packages to around £27,000 (up some £1,500 on last year's levels).  A quarter of top graduate programmes will be paying new recruits more than £30,000, with retailer Aldi paying the most (£40K + Audi A4) followed by the investment banking, legal and management consulting sectors respectively.

Unsurprisingly, this year's finalists are now extremely pessimistic about their employment prospects.  As High Fliers Research MD Martin Birchall, notes, "There is understandable panic on campus that this is shaping up to be one of the worst years of the last two decades to be graduating from university."  Half of students think they'll probably have to take any job that's offered them, while a third of finalists concede that they should have started looking for jobs sooner.