TARGETjobs Breakfast News
SCRAMBLED EGGS BUT NO MIXED MESSAGES…
The ever-loyal audience for TARGETjobs Breakfast News rose with the lark for the September News event, its numbers swelling to 200 with the great and the good from the world of graduate recruitment. The venue was Quaglino’s restaurant in London’s West End – all glass and brass in terms of décor and all class in terms of speakers therein. The morning’s topic was the ‘Fresher thinking: engaging talent earlier’. Steve James, head of editorial at TARGETjobs reports…
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‘For the freshers of 2012, the first iPhone went on sale at the start of their teens. These new technologies are hewn into their landscapes.’
T
he eggs were scrambled for September’s TARGETjobs Breakfast News but the message from the event’s
speakers wasn’t: Engage, engage, engage with first-year students and school leavers to complement the pipeline of talent from second-year students through to graduates. That this all-important ‘early years’ audience are so-called
digital natives couldn’t have been made clearer by April Bryce and Tristan Moakes from the Work Group. After the posh nosh was served they pointed out that: ‘For the freshers of 2012, the first iPhone went on sale at the start of their teens. These new technologies are hewn into their landscapes.’ The speakers’ advice to graduate recruiters seeking to attract young talent was: give them something that feels useful and keep the communication going.
Keep the message light Sam Delaney, ex-editor of Heat magazine spoke about the need to keep the message light and bright in terms of tone when addressing school leavers and students. He said: ‘Even among the mindless indulgence of Heat magazine we used to cover the general election and campaigns such as skin cancer awareness without ever being worthy.’ Meanwhile, AGR CEO Carl Gilleard said that a
fragmented education system and patchy networks between schools and overstretched company HR departments leads to young people making poor decisions about their careers. Head teachers who know little about the world of work plus financial pressures upon families only serve to make matters worse. ‘The dismantling of the countrywide Connnexions
careers service has a chilling effect,’ warned Gilleard. ‘Without clear guidance provision we’ll see a lot of young people take a wrong route in their formative years.’
28 GRADUATE RECRUITER
Employers’ resources constrained And with fewer school leavers heading to university, traditional graduate recruiters are recruiting more school leavers. ‘But the issue is that the majority of employers view increasing their engagement at schools level purely as a brand awareness initiative,’ says Gilleard who revealed disappointment that only four per cent of those in his association polled in the survey revealed at Breakfast News gave ‘to attract a greater diversity of students’ as a motive for talking to schoolchildren. Visits to schools by recruiters are still the preferred means of reaching this age group but 75 per cent of those blue- chip employers surveyed said resource constraints were holding back recruiters from marketing to ‘early years’ students. Economist Bryan Finn was also on hand to give his
quarterly update. He reported that labour market flexibility and depressed wages are keeping the worst of the wolves from the door in terms of unemployment but – combined with inflation – are still dampening consumer confidence and spending. Among Bryan’s slides was evidence that fewer young people are applying to university and increased numbers are looking to apprenticeships and other schemes for school leavers. None of which gives traditional graduate recruiters
reason to row back on their commitment to target university talent – but it does up the ante in the schools market. Grab the attention of school leavers and freshers while
they’re still fresh seems to be the verdict from this event – and hang on to the audience or else a rival employer will take it from you.
To find out more about TARGETjobs Breakfast News, contact Rachel Cox:
rachel.cox@
targetjobs.co.uk
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