Careers Fair Data Analysis 2013 Vs 2012 Seasons

Posted by Daniel Purchas

Careers Fair Data Analysis 2013 Vs 2012 Seasons

The AAGE have released their annual report outlining the attendances of organisations advertising to University students in Australia and we’ve taken a quick look at some of the numbers and trends comparing the 2013 season to last years in 2012.

Career Fair

2013 Scheduling

It was a tough Season schedule wise with 13 days of the season having multiple fairs on in different states, some days of the season even had 4 fairs on at once. This was due to the Easter holiday weekend starting on the 29th of March this year.
Next year is looking like a fairly compact season even though Easter is a lot later on in April, you can see the draft schedule from the AAGE website here.

Changes in 2013 from the 2012 Season

One of the major changes for this year has been the number of fairs held. There were 36 fairs held in 2013 compared to 41 held in 2012. The Virtual Careers fair that has run over the past few years was not continued in 2013. A number of University fairs, specifically Victoria University, La Trobe, Deakin & Charles Darwin, were not held in 2013.

Exhibitor Entrances and Exits to the Careers Fair Circuit 2013

New exhibitors at fairs in 2013 sit at 194 new organisations attending a fair in 2013 who did not attend one last year, this is down around 20% from 2012 where there were 258 new exhibitors who had previously not advertised in 2011.

Exiting exhibitors in 2013 totalled 112 organisations who did not attend a careers fair this year but had attended a fair last year. The drop off rate in 2012 from 2011 was sitting at 71 organisations who dropped off from one year to the next

Total Attending Organisations and total fair bookings

This figure looks at the number of unique organisations that attended a careers fair between this year and last year:

  • 2013: 554 Attending Organisations went to at least one fair in 2013
  • 2012: 639 Attending Organisations went to at least one fair in 2013

Trend: Overall there was a reduction in number of attending organisations by just over 13%

Total number of fair bookings

This figure looks at the number of total careers fair bookings made by all of the total pool of exhibitors from one year to the next:

  • 2013: 1995 attendances – avg per organisation attended: 3.6
  • 2012: 2542 attendances – avg per organisation attended: 3.9

Trend: Overall the number of individual fair bookings is down by 20% and with close to 90 less organisations attending overall slightly less fairs each has led to this decline in numbers.

Spending on Careers Fairs

For the 2013 season we have roughly estimated to be $2.1 – $2.2 Million down from an approximate spend in 2012 of $2.8 - $2.9 Million.

Distribution of Attendances

Of the total of 554 individual organisations that attended 1,995 careers fairs in total here is how the rough distribution of numbers of fairs that were attended by each individual organisation:

  • 1 Career Fair Attended: 250 Employers or 45.1% of attending employers
  • 2 Careers Fairs Attended: 97 Employers or 17.5% of attending employers
  • 3 – 5 Careers Fairs Attended: 18.4% of attending employers
  • 6 – 10 Careers Fairs Attended: 11.7% of attending employers
  • 11 – 20 Careers Fairs Attended: 5.8% of attending employers
  • 20+ Careers Fairs Attended: 1.4% of attending employers

What will next year bring?

Careers fairs are always going to be one of the first ports of call when it comes to putting together a campus marketing strategy for a lot of employers but with a lot of employers looking to cover the whole of Australia with their graduate recruitment programs they are becoming harder to use as many organisations look to reduce costs across the board in the current economic environment.

One set of fairs that weren't included in the wrap up that are worth noting are the CPA Australia, Institute of Chartered Accountants and Engineers Australia specialist careers fairs that target both Accounting & Engineering students respectively. We have seen a few of the employers we work with switch from the more generalist on campus fairs to some of these degree specific fairs.

One gem we found this season that a few employers may want to take note of was the University of Wollongong fair. With a lot of employers recruiting IT students and not enough IT graduates finishing their degrees each year, Wollongong had a large number of IT students in attendance on the day of their fair, Wollongong is also one of the largest producers of IT graduates in the country. To back this up, there were also a large amount of Mining Engineers at Wollongong on the day as well.

Any recruiters out there got any other tips on good fairs you have attended this year? Leave some comments down below if you do and no doubt we will see you out on campus again in March.


Search

Enter an employer or university you want to find in our search bar.