A new report, The Graduate Market in 2016: Annual review of graduate vacancies & starting salaries at Britain’s leading employers, has been published by High Fliers Research, who specialises in student and graduate research. The research – conducted December 2015 – looks at the top 100 graduate employers, expected graduate vacancies, starting salaries, availability of work experience, and other graduate-related themes and challenges.
The report is broken down into 5 chapter: (1) Introduction; (2) Graduate Vacancies; (3) Graduate Starting Salaries; (4) Internships & Work Placements; (5) Graduate Recruitment in 2015-2016.
Chapter 1 presents Higher Fliers Research, the Times top 100 graduate employers, and has a short introduction on researching the graduate market. Each chapter ends with key findings, presented below as taken from the document.
Chapter 2: Graduate Vacancies
- The number of graduates hired by organisations featured in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers rose by 3.3% in 2015, compared with recruitment in 2014, a smaller annual increase than had been expected.
- A noticeable rise in the number of graduates turning down or reneging on job offers that they had previously accepted meant that over 1,000 graduate positions were left unfilled last year, reducing the graduate intake at almost a third of the UK’s leading employers.
- The country’s top employers plan to expand their graduate recruitment by a further 7.5% in 2016, the fourth consecutive year that graduate vacancies have increased.
- This significant rise in graduate vacancies for 2016 takes recruitment beyond the pre-recession peak in the graduate job market in 2007, to its highest-ever level.
- Employers in nine out of thirteen key industries and employment areas are expecting to take on more new graduates than in 2015.
- The biggest growth in vacancies is expected at public sector organisations, banking & finance employers, engineering & industrial companies and the Armed Forces which together intend to recruit over 1,300 extra graduates in 2016.
- The largest individual recruiters of new graduates in 2016 will be Teach First (1,870 vacancies), PwC (1,540 vacancies) and Deloitte (1,100 vacancies).
- Recruiters have confirmed that 32% of this year’s entry-level positions are expected to be filled by graduates who have already worked for their organisations, either through paid internships, industrial placements or vacation work.
Chapter 3: Graduate Starting Salaries
- Graduate starting salaries at the UK’s leading graduate employers are expected to remain unchanged in 2016, at a median starting salary of £30,000.
- At least a fifth of places on the top graduate programmes now provide starting salaries of more than £35,000 and eight of the country’s best-known graduate employers are paying salaries in excess of £45,000 this year.
- The most generous salaries in 2016 are those on offer from the investment banks (median of £47,000), law firms (median of £41,000), banking & finance companies (median of £36,000) and oil & energy companies (median of £32,500).
- The highest published graduate starting salaries for 2016 include Aldi (£42,000), law firms Allen & Overy, Baker & McKenzie, Herbert Smith Freehills and Linklaters (all £42,000) and the European Commission (£41,500). Foreword Executive Summary The Graduate Market in 2016 6
- There is very 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 2015 or 2016 appear to have done so in order to compete effectively with other employers recruiting graduates.
Chapter 4: Internships & Work Placements
- More than 90% of the UK’s leading graduate employers are offering paid work experience programmes for students and recent graduates during the 2015-2016 academic year – an unprecedented 14,058 places are available.
- Three-quarters of employers provide paid vacation internships for penultimate year students and at least half offer industrial placements for undergraduates (typically lasting 6-12 months as part of a university degree course).
- Increasing numbers of 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.
- Almost 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.
Chapter 5: Graduate Recruitment in 2015-2016
- More than a quarter of the country’s leading employers have increased their graduate recruitment budgets for the 2015-2016 recruitment round.
- Employers have been actively marketing their 2016 graduate vacancies at an average of 20 UK universities, using a variety of campus recruitment presentations, local careers fairs, skills training events, promotions through university careers services, online advertising and social media.
- Graduate recruiters made more use of social media, university recruitment presentations, skills training events, drop-in sessions and campus brand managers 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 2015-2016 are Manchester, Nottingham, Warwick, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, University College London, Durham, Bath and Leeds.
- Over half the UK’s leading employers said they had received more completed graduate job applications during the early part of the recruitment season than they had last year and two-fifths believed the quality of applications had improved too.
- Together, the country’s top employers have received 13% more graduate job applications so far, compared with the equivalent period in the 2014-2015 recruitment round.