Last week saw an awards event that will make graduate employers take note. The Targetjobs 2008 National Graduate Recruitment Awards are now an established benchmark with regards to who are getting it right when it comes to graduate recruitment. As the majority of the awards (all except one), were voted for by 34,000 students - the classic Generation Y demographic - the results do provide a great view of what these future recruits see as the way forward.
The 'big' award went to IBM UK - The Graduate Employer of the Year. The big blue machine is obviously reinventing itself for the youth of today, but with the scale of the organisation they are able to offer very diverse career opportunities. For all this, they still don't value recruitment enough to put them on their homepage - you try and find recruitment on it!!
The award for the Best Graduate Recruitment Website went to QinetiQ, a fast growing employer of choice. Nice touch to appeal to Gen Y'ers is the new technology video section, not surprisingly aimed at energy saving - a particular favourite with them at the moment! You just compare this clean informative and appealing site to the brand new career site from McDonald's which is truly awful (what is with all that black)!!
I guess the 'most obvious' award - The Most Popular Graduate Recruiter -IT and Comms - goes to, yes you have guessed it.....Google. Self explanatory really. But it will be interesting to see if the US issues will effect Google's UK recruiting for next year.
There was an award I was looking forward reviewing - The Best Student Marketing Campaign (50+ grads) - was won by GCHQ . The problem is that as it is part of the British intelligence service, I unsurprisingly couldn't find it!!
Across the rest of the awards, there were many expected winners (in my opinion anyway), as they have been heavily involved in grad recruitment for a number of years, and have developed real graduate employment brands. The other award winners were as follows.
The Most Popular Graduate Recruiters for: (check out these really good graduate career sites!)
- Banking & Investment - Goldman Sachs International
- Construction - Atkins
- Consulting - Accenture
- Engineering & Science - GlaxoSmithKline
- Finance & Professional Services - Deloitte
- Law - Allen & Overy LLP
- Retail - Marks & Spencers
While GCHQ got the 'secret squirrel' award for the Best Student Marketing Campaign (50+ grads), The Audit Commission won the same award for <50 graduates (really interesting career site).
Diversity is important to many grads at the moment, and the award for Diversity Recruitment went to DLA Piper UK LLP. Not sure what they did to win this award, but RWE npower won the interestingly titled award, The Innovation on Campus Award. Again a very inviting grad site, but 5 clicks to get there is a little too many isn't - or is it a test of commitment??
The final three awards of the night went to Nabarro LLP for the Best Undergraduate Internship / vacation Programme, JP Morgan for the AGCAS Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award went to the Chief Executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, Carl Gilleard.
