FEATURE


THE GRADUATE RECRUITMENT INSIGHTS REPORT: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR BENCHMARKING


It’s no surprise that most HR budgets have been reduced in recent years, which makes life tough for in-house resourcing teams trying to compete to deliver the best hires for their organisation, whilst managing huge application volumes. But reduced budgets do at least focus the mind on how to realise efficiencies in order to do more for less, and hopefully actually increase the quality of hires. Creativity, ingenuity and intelligence are the focus for all resourcing teams and their supplier partners in 2013, and, by improving recruitment effectiveness, organisations should ensure that they are best placed to deliver against their broader talent acquisition agenda, such as diversity. Ben Jackson, Director, GradWeb reports.


Why is benchmarking important?


At a time like this, benchmarking can help employers to understand not just how well they are doing in comparison with their talent competitors, but also what they can do better. Benchmark data provides the quantitative evidence that enables graduate recruiters to focus on the right levers for improvements to be made to their campaigns and drive strategic decisions and initiatives. The process of benchmarking is more than simply selecting the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and monitoring performance against them. The real insight comes from comparing these indicators to external benchmarks. In a former life, I used to get asked continually about how many female engineers my team was recruiting. I’d reference UK engineering graduate gender statistics, but the response was always “But how are we doing against our competitors?” The newly launched Graduate Recruitment Insights Report helps graduate recruiters by providing a cross- sector, cross-functional view of graduate applications from our UK client base. Using data from over 75,000 annual candidate applications, the research provides the first real opportunity to benchmark against multiple industries and the overall UK landscape. The report serves as an objective measuring stick to enable


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graduate recruiters to make informed business decisions, develop strategy, create initiatives, as well as improve their recruitment processes on the basis of cold, hard data for the first time.


Steps to benefit from benchmarking The following steps outline a simple benchmarking approach that graduate recruiters could adopt to enhance their campaigns:


1. Identify key KPIs 2. Gather internal campaign data 3. Gather external data (such as the Insights Report) 4. Compare data sets and identify gaps / areas for improvement


5. Create action plan 6. Implement plan 7. Continuously review


The graduate recruitment world is tough at the moment, so ensuring that you have the right benchmarks and market intelligence at your fingertips is vital. If you would like to find out more about how The Graduate Recruitment Insights Report is able to help benchmark your graduate recruitment, or if you would like a copy of the report, please email info@gradweb.co.uk


In a former life, I used to get asked continually about how many female engineers my team was recruiting. I’d reference UK engineering graduate gender


statistics, but the response was always “But how are we doing against our competitors?”


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