Thanks to some encouragement from Josh Mckenzie of DBL fame, we decided to upgrade from a Bronze to a Gold sponsorship this year for the AAGE conference held last week in Melbourne. This of course means that you get to run a presentation/workshop session as part of the official conference program and run a workshop we did on all things to do with the internet and how graduates are using it to find work in Australia.
The Origins of GC & where we're at now
The first thing we covered was why 3 graduates from Westpac IT in Wellington started GradConnection in the first place. Our whole business started from the fact that we couldn't find a good online resource that showed us employers who were interested in hiring graduates, because we knew that graduates were online and this resource should exist in July 2008 we moved to Sydney and started GradConnection. Since we started here's some of our achievements:
- We have over 80 employers on the site
- We're now getting over 50,000 visits to the site every month
- Over 80,000 during the peak months
- We're the highest traffic ranked graduate employment site in Australia according to Alexia.com. If you want to check how a website's performing Alexa is the online benchmark recognised by web experts all over the world. It's easy to use just go to alexa.com and search the url.
Keep an eye on the site and over the coming weeks we'll have the third version coming out which will improve on the above stats even more!
Grad Employer Assessment Centre The Marketplace
It seemed only fair that with a room full of Graduate Recruiters at our mercy, we should put them through their paces with a mini assessment centre focussed around the level of graduate activity online in Australia and the numbers of final year graduates finishing their studies each year here. We thought it was important to run through these areas to set the scene and provide some benchmarks to showcase the scale that we're working on so here are the areas we covered:
- The number of graduate job related searches per month on www.google.com.au
- There are around 225,000 -250,000 searches made to find graduate jobs in Australia each month on google.com.au
- The number of final year students completing a degree at any level in Australia
- 140,000 graduate with a degree at any level per year.
- What percentage of final year students are domestic and what percentage are international
- The split was 71% (100,000) domestic and 29% (40,000) international
- How many final year ICT students graduate each year in Australia
- With ICT graduates being some of the most in demand students in Australia at the moment, it is surprising to find out that there are only around 3,500 graduating from university each year
- What is the most popular city for graduates work in once they have finished their degrees?
- Melbourne came in as number one which is surprising to us as around 50% of graduates wanted to work there upon graduating.
- How many University students are currently on Facebook in Australia?
- Approximately 750,000
- What group of students are the most sophisticated when using search engines to find work in Australia?
- Engineering Graduates
- What is the percentage of recruitment marketing budget spent on Print Vs. Online Advertising?
Your Graduate Website and how to Analyse it
We've got a 'how to guide' on setting up Crazy Egg, Woopra & Google Analytics for you own graduate site here.
Building Online Talent Communities
Finally we finished with David Als from HCMS to talk about building online talent communities. We're often asked about social media strategies and how to implement them, David goes a lot deeper than just setting up company Facebook and Twitter pages and took us through how you decide on what channels to use, boolean searches on Google to find exactly who you want and how it can be applied in the graduate recruitment industry. If you want to get in touch with David all his contact details are on his Twitter page and you can follow David here.
The wrap up
We had to finish things pretty quickly as we ran out of time, we knew we'd always be pushing it trying to fit a day's worth of speakers into an hour! We were hoping to have some time for a few questions so leave a comment below if you had something you wanted to ask us but didn't get a chance to.