...49% of our respondents hadn’t attended university themselves, and the majority of them influenced at least one of their child’s main career decisions (84.75%).


Career Decision Which academic route their child should take


The career choices their child would make Which industry/sector to apply for


Which employers to apply for roles with Which offers to accept/reject Table 1


The results of these questions provide Future Talent employers with an opportunity – the ability to put particular emphasis on the most important factors, to maximise the impact of their graduate careers pages (see figure 1).


Generally, the cosmetic aspects of a role (e.g. salary, benefits, and location) were ranked as the least important – to a parent. A good benefits package isn’t enough to encourage them to influence their child to work for your organisation or apply for your role.


As part of our investigation, we also looked at two main career decisions students will need to make – the decisions and results are outlined in the table below (see table 1).


What would make you discourage your child from accepting a job offer? We’d love to be able to give you a definitive answer to the above – however, the market and student recruitment environment is constantly changing. What might make a parent discourage their child from accepting a job offer today may not be representative of last year’s intake. We did, though, ask all of


our respondents to comment on what, if anything, would make them discourage their child.


Here are some of the responses we received:


“The reputation of a company – their image and caring for people in their business.”


“A poorly written contract.”


“A lack of development and career progression within the role.”


“An organisation’s ethics and values.”


Have you encountered any employers who are engaging parents in their recruitment process? It’s clear that parents are heavily influential in the student recruitment market, and play a much greater part than has been previously noted. To further contextualise the current lack of attention paid to parents by student recruiters, we asked all respondents whether or not they’d encountered any employers who actively engaged them in their recruitment process.


% chosen to influence 57.5


39.2


43.4 47.5


94% of respondents said they hadn’t encountered any whatsoever.


Of the 6% of respondents who had been previously engaged in the recruitment process, 1.5% indicated it was with one of our Future Talent clients.


The results of our Parental Research provide recruiters with the opportunity to tailor the information they make available to parents. As Future Talent recruiters, ask yourself the following questions: • How will this role be viewed by parents?


• Which elements of this role would encourage parents to influence their child in our favour?


• Do we have touchpoints throughout the recruitment process where we actively engage and involve parents?


In order to effectively involve parents in your recruitment, you first need to understand what they want for their child. Only then are you able to positively influence the influencers.


Our 2017 Parental Research report is due to be released in Q4 of this year. If you’d like to receive an exclusive copy – please get in touch.


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