The Graduate Market in 2015
• The highest published graduate starting salaries for 2015 are at Aldi (£42,000) and the European Commission (£41,500) . • There is little evidence that graduate starting salaries are rising in reaction to the introduction of higher university tuition fees – most employers that have opted to increase their graduate pay in either 2014 or 2015 appear to have done so in order to compete effectively with other employers recruiting graduates. • Over four-fifths of the UK’s leading graduate employers are offering paid work experience programmes for students and recent graduates during the 2014-2015 academic year – an unprecedented 13,049 paid work placements are available. • Two-thirds of employers provide paid vacation internships for penultimate year students and over half offer industrial placements for undergraduates (typically lasting 6-12 months as part of a university degree course). • Many more employers now also have work experience places for first year undergraduates – over a quarter of organisations offer paid internships and two-fifths of employers run introductory courses, open days and other taster experiences for first year students. • Nearly half the recruiters who took part in the research repeated their warnings from previous years – that graduates who have had no previous work experience at all are unlikely to be successful during the selection process and have little or no chance of receiving a job offer for their organisations’ graduate programmes. • A quarter of the country’s leading employers have increased their graduate recruitment budgets for the 2014-2015 recruitment round. • Employers have been actively marketing their 2015 graduate vacancies at an average of 19 UK universities, using a variety of local recruitment presentations , campus careers fairs , skills training events, promotions through university careers services , online advertising and social media . • Graduate recruiters made more use of local careers fairs , recruitment presentations , skills training events , campus brand managers and social media , during this year’s recruitment campaigns – and did less advertising in local career guides and sector guides. • The ten universities most-often targeted by Britain’s top graduate employers in 2014- 2015 are Manchester, Nottingham, Warwick, Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, Bristol, Imperial College London, University College London and Leeds. • A third of employers said they had received more completed graduate job applications during the early part of the recruitment season than they had last year and a similar proportion believed the quality of applications had improved too. • Together, the UK’s top employers have received 6% more graduate job applications so far, compared with the equivalent period in the 2013-2014 recruitment round.
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