Breakfast update on graduate market

Wednesday 2^nd April saw the launch of TARGETjobs' bimonthly Breakfast News series of events with a well-attended inaugural session at Simpson's-in-the-Strand.  The event was sponsored by the Graduate Solutions Team of TMP Worldwide and produced in association with the AGR.

Once the assembled delegates had polished off their ‘full English', GTI chief executive Paul Sissons kicked off proceedings by highlighting a number of recent GTI initiatives - including the consolidation of its print and online offerings under the ‘TARGETjobs' brand last September - as part of the group's global development strategy.  He then outlined what will become the standard Breakfast News format: three bite-sized presentations providing complementary updates on the graduate recruitment market, delivered every couple of months at a different London venue.  Each event will include an economic forecast (relating the macroeconomic picture to the UK graduate recruitment market), a piece of student-related research and a ‘recruiter confidence snapshot'.

Sales director and GTI board member Simon Rogers introduced the first speaker, Bryan Finn of Business Economics, who tried hard not to sound too pessimistic in running through the various economic indicators.  Looking at trends over the last thirty years he noted that a slowdown, let alone a full-blown recession, was enough to affect the recruitment advertising industry adversely, while in the wider economic context the significant growth of emerging economies in Asia and elsewhere would not be sufficient to stave off the global impact of a US recession.  Taken together, all the figures suggested that recruitment markets would be ‘soft' throughout 2008, but it seems that there's a little silver lining: although the general consensus is that we're in for a difficult year, most forecasters agree that 2009 should see a slight improvement.

Next, TMP's planning director Neil Harrison shared some (very) recent research on graduates' confidence about their employment prospects.  Just over 800 final-year students (accessed through GTI's database) completed the online survey, and it was apparent that their final year of study represented something of a tipping-point in terms of their employment confidence levels.  The research also revealed that few students had much idea of how many graduate jobs were likely to be available to them, or the factors likely to influence this - a communications gap that the industry needed to fill.  A third of the survey's respondents represented the growing cohort of home-based students, and their low level of attendance at campus-based events suggested that, if these were seen by recruiters as the key battleground for hearts and minds, a significant proportion of the student population was being bypassed in the process.

As its own surveys are biannual, AGR chief executive Carl Gilleard welcomed the opportunity to provide a bimonthly update on the state of the graduate recruitment market.  Despite the prevailing economic gloom, a recent survey of around a quarter of AGR members (predominantly private-sector organisations) revealed that most expect the number of graduates they recruit this (and indeed next) year to be either similar to, or greater than, the number they recruited last year.  It was also interesting that they tended to be markedly more confident about the prospects of their own businesses than the UK economy at large.  Carl concluded by saying that, apart from the investment banking sector, there was little evidence that organisations were cutting back on graduate recruitment, and that skill shortages continued to be the biggest challenge facing most of them.

Thanking the speakers for their insights, Simon Rogers said the next TARGETjobs Breakfast News was due to take place on Tuesday 3^rd June at a bigger, yet-to-be-confirmed London venue.