Fixing the broken model of graduate recruitment

Recruit­ing the best and bright­est grad­u­ates is vital to build­ing a sus­tain­able tal­ent pipeline. Hir­ing dig­i­tal natives from the most diverse gen­er­a­tion yet is also key to help­ing com­pa­nies tack­le the skills gap and build a more inclu­sive work­force.

Yet in many ways the tra­di­tion­al grad­u­ate recruit­ment mod­el is bro­ken. Too often com­pa­nies are bound by geog­ra­phy, estab­lish­ing rela­tion­ships with only a hand­ful of uni­ver­si­ties in their local area which lim­its the tal­ent pool avail­able to them.

Most com­pa­nies also lack the data they need to reach the right can­di­dates. This is appar­ent both in terms of skills—particularly when it comes to jobs that don’t have a strong pipeline from voca­tion­al cours­es, or for SMEs with few­er resources to recruit at scale—and in terms of equal­i­ty, diver­si­ty and inclu­sion cri­te­ria. The result leaves com­pa­nies reliant upon one-size-fits-all mar­ket­ing approach­es that rarely yield the best results.

But what if com­pa­nies could vast­ly widen the grad­u­ate tal­ent pool avail­able to them? What if the data they need­ed to screen can­di­dates prop­er­ly was avail­able at the touch of a but­ton?

War for talent

Since 2013, Hand­shake has been work­ing to solve these prob­lems by build­ing the world’s biggest ear­ly career net­work, help­ing mil­lions of stu­dents from all back­grounds to get hired and launch their careers. 

The plat­form offers a unique three-way-mar­ket­place, which cur­rent­ly con­nects more than 1,400 uni­ver­si­ties, 650,000 employ­ers and 200,000 stu­dents and alum­ni across the world. The firm works with grad­u­ate employ­ers from top For­tune 500 and FTSE 100 com­pa­nies as well as thou­sands of small busi­ness­es, char­i­ties and star­tups across the US, UK and rest of Europe.

“The war for tal­ent is hot­ter than ever, with the labour mar­ket cur­rent­ly chal­leng­ing for many employ­ers,” says Jonathan Lu, the company’s gen­er­al man­ag­er for EMEA. “Reach­ing gen‑Z grad­u­ate recruits is there­fore crit­i­cal, con­fer­ring a real com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, and this is where Hand­shake comes in.”

A key ben­e­fit of the plat­form is that it helps employ­ers to reach gen‑Z audi­ences, which can be noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult.

Stu­dents in this cohort view career pro­gres­sion dif­fer­ent­ly, with high­er expec­ta­tions around pro­mo­tions, salaries and job moves. They care deeply about a company’s val­ues on issues such as diver­si­ty and the envi­ron­ment and expect a ‘dig­i­tal-first’ approach when it comes to mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions. In fact, Hand­shake research shows that two-thirds of ear­ly-career job seek­ers believe they do not need to meet in-per­son at all to forge a mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion.

Breaking down the barriers

To break down these bar­ri­ers, Handshake’s plat­form offers com­pa­nies a seam­less way to com­mu­ni­cate and build rela­tion­ships with gen‑Z stu­dents. It also facil­i­tates these rela­tion­ships right from the start of their degrees, not just from year three.

Com­pa­nies can build their own brand­ed land­ing page on the plat­form, man­age event reg­is­tra­tions and pub­li­cise men­tor­ing, career advice and job oppor­tu­ni­ties. Stu­dents access this infor­ma­tion through the Hand­shake app, while also being able to mes­sage employ­ers and uni­ver­si­ty careers offices direct­ly.

“There is still sig­nif­i­cant work to be done in terms of improv­ing stu­dent con­fi­dence in their career goals dur­ing their stud­ies,’’ Lu says. “Our research shows that a third of stu­dents feel very con­fi­dent about their career prospects dur­ing the first year of their course, drop­ping to 31% in year two and falling dra­mat­i­cal­ly again to just 17% in year three.

“Using tech­nol­o­gy to facil­i­tate con­nec­tions with employ­ers soon­er and to enable more con­tin­u­ous recruit­ment can play a big role here.”

Handshake’s plat­form links employ­ers to a much wider range of uni­ver­si­ty careers ser­vices teams and stu­dents than was pre­vi­ous­ly pos­si­ble, widen­ing the avail­able tal­ent pool. In the UK, where it launched in 2020, some 14,000 employ­ers and over 220,000 stu­dents already use the ser­vice. And that num­ber is grow­ing every week.

Employ­ers can also unlock new data insights on prospec­tive can­di­dates. Among oth­er things, Hand­shake enables com­pa­nies to search for stu­dents based on their degree, lan­guages spo­ken, soci­eties they have joined and their achieve­ments, as well as their eth­nic­i­ty, gen­der and socioe­co­nom­ic back­ground.

“We offer a ‘pos­i­tive screen­ing mod­el’ where you can’t fil­ter peo­ple out based on EDI cri­te­ria but you can fil­ter them in,” says Lu. “The idea is that more can­di­dates from dif­fer­ent back­grounds get recog­nised and employ­ers get access to pre­vi­ous­ly hard-to-reach pools of tal­ent.”

Building a more diverse workforce

These data insights enable employ­ers to active­ly tar­get pri­or­i­ty groups and engage the peo­ple they want to hire, allow­ing them to opti­mise their grad­u­ate recruit­ment events. It also helps them build a more diverse work­force, which is self-rein­forc­ing because gen‑Z can­di­dates find this attrac­tive.

The tech recruit­ment com­pa­ny FDM turned to Hand­shake to help it build rela­tion­ships with top tal­ent around the world. The Lon­don-based firm, which has 5,000 employ­ees, was strug­gling to com­pete for young work­ers with the world’s biggest tech brands, lead­ing to long hir­ing cycles and a lack of high-qual­i­ty can­di­dates.

With Hand­shake it was able to iden­ti­fy almost 1,400 can­di­dates in a sin­gle year, pro­mote 70 vir­tu­al events and achieve a 50% uplift in grad­u­ate job post­ings.

By tap­ping into Handshake’s net­work of stu­dents in the UK, FDM instant­ly broad­ened its options and boost­ed its recruit­ment rate, sav­ing time in the process. It was able to under­stand its can­di­dates at a more gran­u­lar lev­el and move beyond blan­ket mar­ket­ing cam­paigns towards more per­son­alised mes­sag­ing that built trust.

Lu says anoth­er big ben­e­fit of using the plat­form is achiev­ing greater cost effi­cien­cy. Employ­ers that use Hand­shake typ­i­cal­ly see a low­er cost per hire and faster time to hire, mean­ing bet­ter val­ue for mon­ey over all.

“Tech­nol­o­gy can help facil­i­tate a shift in acqui­si­tion prac­tices that employ­ers are telling us they want,” says Lu. “Com­pa­nies are look­ing to build mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships with grad­u­ates that boost their tal­ent pipelines. That means com­mu­ni­cat­ing with those can­di­dates through a more seam­less and con­tin­u­ous recruit­ment process, mak­ing ear­li­er con­nec­tions with qual­i­ty can­di­dates.”

For prac­ti­cal advice on tack­ling your pri­or­i­ties in the year ahead, down­load our Grad­u­ate Employ­er Pri­or­i­ties 2023 report at joinhandshake.co.uk/gep

Pro­mot­ed by Hand­shake