Going back to basics
Old is new
Daniel Schlappa, Business Development Manager and Thomas Freeman, Managing Director of Sanctuary Graduates, a firm which employs well connected university students across the UK and Europe as headhunters, explore the extent to which peer recommendations influence the decisions of students applying to graduate schemes.
Daniel Schlappa Thomas Freeman
events to attract candidates, we thought we would focus on harnessing the power of what students do every day, all the time. Whether they are studying, eating or drinking, students are always talking. We want to explore just how important student discussions at the grass roots really are, how males and females can be influenced by peers into different employment sectors, how diversity issues can be addressed, and the steps employers can take to harness the power of peer-to- peer recommendations.
R
Some survey figures After surveying how students engage with employers’ various attraction methods, we found a notable mismatch between the approaches most favoured by HR teams (according to the 2015 High Fliers Report) and those which our study suggested students’ best engage with. As expected, we found that in 2014-15, company websites remained the number one source of information and inspiration, with over 50% of males and 70% of females citing this as their main influence when applying to a job. The next biggest factor, however, was word of mouth, with 40% of males and 51% of females saying that conversations with friends and course mates led them to make an application. Social media came in third, followed by commercial job boards, careers fairs and the careers service. None of the top graduate attraction methods in the High Fliers Report from the past 5 years have been aimed explicitly at capitalising on the influence that peer recommendations can have, so we thought we would share our insights into quite how important they can be.
24 Graduate Recruiter |
www.agr.org.uk
ather than talking about how to use the latest technology, business games or campus
Why does student chatter matter? By student chatter, we do not mean Facebook engagement, how many times your post is retweeted or brand ambassador marketing. We mean real conversations between students at the bar, on the way back from the sports field, at society meetings and so on. Our on-campus student headhunters (all currently at university) consistently report that the majority of students - though notably more females - can be both positively and negatively influenced by their friends’ employment advice.
Brand perception: the good and the bad Students with strong opinions (or indeed grievances) often air them - and loudly. This can have a massive impact on what we call the ‘silent percentage’; those students who decide, consciously or otherwise, to avoid certain firms or even whole sectors based on what they have heard about them. Fortunately, the reverse is also true. For students deciding on whether to embark upon a lengthy application process, or indeed which of the myriad opportunities to engage with, a nudge in the right direction from a friend is often decisive.
What do students think? “I wouldn’t have found out about it otherwise - I wasn’t actually aware of who the company were” says Olivia, who studied Politics at Nottingham and is now working for one of Europe’s leading asset managers. “Using peer networks to find out about jobs is really effective, because when you hear it from someone who’s in the same situation as you, maybe doing the same degree as you, it makes you feel like you can definitely apply to the job, whereas if you hear it from a website… you think ‘oh, maybe I’m not able to do that’”.
Employment sectors and gender differences Whilst both genders are open to peer recommendations, our student headhunters have found that females are typically more open to peer influences regarding roles in technology and finance than males (who need little encouragement in this area). That fewer females apply to these sectors is hardly a revelation, but the amount of influence that peer recommendations can have is something of which employers should take note.
Following large public and private sector drives, the gender balance in these sectors has started to change – but slowly. The OECD released a report last year which found that 57% of female STEM students pursued their first job in a non-STEM area. For employers looking at new ways of addressing this problem, getting well connected females to identify and approach strong candidates can offer a fast and effective solution. Males, for their part, were more likely to act on recommendations about public sector finance and FMCG engineering schemes, also indicating a potential lack of awareness about the opportunities and rewards in these areas.
Solving diversity problems Harnessing the benefits of student chatter offers an effective way of overcoming diversity issues, many of which exist due to industry preconceptions, lack of self confidence and insufficient awareness amongst key demographics. Peer recommendations cut right to the core of these problems, since the message comes not from the corporate side but from a friend unhampered by the employer/student divide; someone who is therefore able to
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32