3 reasons why hiring graduates in 2022 won’t be easy

You might give graduates a chance, but will they give you one?

Investing in young talent has its obvious benefits. They are tech savvy, their tertiary studies have taught them to work well to deadlines, and they are predisposed to learning as they have freshly come out of a learning environment. Here are 13 more benefits of hiring grads .

Graduate employment is integral to ensuring young professionals are ready to be the leaders of the future. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to secure young talent.

Here’s why and what you can do about it:

Why is graduate employment becoming increasingly challenging?

The obvious culprit – COVID-19

For 2 years, international students had not been able to enter the country as easily as they had before. The international student population in Australia was 738,107 in 2019. This year, the population was 422,095.

According to Prosple , parent company of GradAustralia, the domestic student population seemingly stopped growing in 2017 – two years before the pandemic. The graph below shows a projection of the university student population in Australia.

With fewer students graduating than previous years, graduate employers will need to get creative about their strategies for winning top talent in a smaller pool of candidates.

Hiring activity is projected to increase

“We’ve seen a steady increase in new employers entering the market for graduates. In Australia there are more than 800 large graduate employers and over 400 in New Zealand,” says Sam McDonald, Enterprise Partnerships Manager at Prosple .

A recent survey contacted by the Australian Association of Graduate Employers found that 56% of employers were planning to hire more graduates in 2023 than in 2022.

On a broader scale, the recruitment difficulty rate in Australia has peaked at 68% across the board.

As a preference, graduate jobs are secondary

A quick search on google trends shows that the term “graduate jobs” has decreased in interest since 2012.

McDonald suggested multiple factors that played into the decline, which includes reasons why students are discouraged from applying for graduate jobs:

• A decrease in the number of students graduating domestically and internationally
• For popular graduate opportunities, there is often a high number of applicants competing for a small number of vacancies
• Graduate programs often have lengthy recruitment processes which is unfavourable
• Jobs after completing graduate programs are not always guaranteed

How to increase your chances of securing graduates

Attraction is going to be key for graduate employers moving forward. In a survey by Prosple, students commonly ranked the following as the most important factors of prospective employers:

• Opportunity for career progression
• Quality of training and development
• Company culture
• Content and quality of work

Interestingly, content and quality of work was ranked first for why a graduate would decline an offer with one employer over another. The second reason being salary.

Here are some ways you can attract graduates into your business.

• Shorten your recruitment process or make it as easy and simple for the candidate as possible
• Develop your employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) – highlight graduates’ most important factors of prospective employers mentioned above
• Attend career fairs and look at listing jobs on university job boards
• Use multiple avenues to source candidates
• Become a Future Insure partner and let us help you with the above!

What is Future Insure?

Future Insure was a graduate program designed to tackle the candidate short market in Insurance.

“Insurance has been a particularly tight candidate market at the best of times,” says Cameron Watson, Fuse’s Head of Strategy.

With 50% of insurance professionals looking to retire within the next 10-15 years, Australia’s second largest industry will be left short of talent.

It is with this in mind that Future Insure was created. Teaching young professionals about careers in insurance will build the Australian talent pool and subsequently ensure future growth of the industry.

Why become a Future Insure program partner?

As a Future Insure program partner, your business will have access to thousands of quality graduates. The recruitment process is completely managed by Fuse Recruitment, meaning you will only meet with the most suitable candidates for your business.

Not only do we present your business as a quality employer, but we also attend career fairs and other events to promote our program for our partners.

Equipped with leading recruitment platforms and technology, our specialist insurance and wealth management consultants will source and screen top quality graduates for your business. Their understanding of the industry helps them identify graduates with the right attitudes and quality to perform well in your business.

What makes Future Insure different to other graduate programs?

Fuse uses an dynamic and targeted resourcing strategy to source our graduates. In combination with our insurance and wealth management resourcing strategies, we use GradAustralia, Australian graduates’ most popular place to find graduate roles, to list our graduate opportunities.

This year, Future Insure was awarded GradAustralia’s Top 100 Graduate Employers ‘Fast Mover’ badge.

What does this mean? It means our partners will see a higher volume of grads through our program.

The Fast Mover badge puts our program alongside businesses such as Apple, Lockheed Martin, and the Department of Social Services as top graduate employers in Australia.

In comparison to graduate employers in similar industries, Future Insure outperforms in both total page views and number of applicants on the GradAustralia platform.

In the last three months alone, we received almost 2,000 applications.

If you’re interested in becoming a Future Insure partner and securing quality graduates, or if you just want to learn more, click here .