6 Graduate Recruitment Trends for 2018

Competition for top talent is fierce, so start prepping your 2018 graduate recruitment strategy now to stay ahead. As more employers introduce graduate programs, your employer branding, offer, candidate experience, and marketing strategies all need to stand up and be seen.

We put together our top graduate recruitment predictions to help you prepare for battle.

1. Employers Will Be More Intentional with Careers Fair Attendance

With decreasing budgets and increasing ROI, employers will continue moving away from a ‘spray and pray’ approach to careers fairs and choose to attend only the fairs that best match their hiring needs. We expect this will allow you to partner with specific unis and connect more deeply with the smaller number of grads you meet. (Stay tuned over the coming weeks when we’ll help you put together your on-campus battle plan.)

2. Employer Branding and Marketing Activities Will Ramp Up on LinkedIn & Instagram.

LinkedIn: Although we’re yet to see graduates fully invest in LinkedIn – with the introduction of video to the professional networking platform, we expect to see more engagement and employer branding activities here. LinkedIn seems to be moving to ‘socialise’ the platform – which will make it more appealing to young professionals. Expect to see more ‘Casual Friday’ content here.

Instagram: 18-29-year-olds are the largest demographic on Instagram (at 59% of all users). It’s a visual storytelling platform that provides a more humanised insight into your organisation, workplace, and culture. Consider ways to integrate Insta-stories and live video into your engagement plan.

3. More Organisations Will Optimise for Mobile

According to Page Up, 89% of job seekers use mobile for their job searching. Equally important, is that mobile is where your primary applicants prefer to hang out. Just last year, millennials spent an average of 223 minutes per day on mobile devices! We’re predicting that more organisations will move to a complete mobile-enabled application experience for all graduate recruitment activities – that is the application and recruitment process, website, and engagement activities.

4. Talent Relationship Management / Personalising the Recruitment Experience

Grads aren’t just treated like a number. More effort will used to identify and ‘court’ top talent early and provide them with an out-of-this-world brand experience. It’s proactive recruitment instead of reactive. Think: tailored and frequent communication, focused social media engagement activities, a touch-point strategy, and automated messaging and chatbots.

5. Recruiting with the Future in Mind

The World Economic Forum Report claims that nearly 50% of subject knowledge acquired during the first year of a four-year technical degree is outdated by the time students graduate! It’s clear to say that skills are the new black. With the rapid pace of technological disruption, increased automation, and estimations that up to 60% of students are training for jobs that won’t exist in the future – we’ll see more organisations move away from “degree-specific” recruitment and focus more on general skills and attributes (like, adaptability, curiosity, problem-solving).

6. We Push the Button on Augmented Reality and Gamified Recruitment

Gamification and video interviews in the shortlisting process are tech trends we’ve seen in use for a while. Perhaps 2018 is the year we see increased uptake of virtual reality to share workplace experiences (check out the CBA), interactive job advertisements, job simulators, Assessment centres, and immersive online assessments.

Is your organisation already doing some of these? Get in touch and let me know what you’re looking to introduce to your recruitment strategy this year. We can help to optimise your profile content and nail your employer brand - send an email to tonyy@gradconnection.com

2018 Graduate Recruitment Trends