Falling at the first hurdle: undergraduate students’ readiness to navigate the graduate recruitment process

Abstract

Falling at the first hurdle: Undergraduate students' readiness to navigate the graduate recruitment process.

University students' perceptions of graduate employer selection tests

“…interviews, numerical reasoning tests). The mean value of students' prediction for each selection test was compared to the percentage of graduate employers who administered these selection tests based on an audit of the Times Top 100 Graduate employers 2018–2019 (see Bradley et al. , 2020).…”

“…An audit of the selection tests used by 100 UK graduate employers provided a measure of the frequency of different selection techniques. The audit was conducted on the Times Top 100 Graduate employers that featured in the 2018-2019 guide and has previously been described and partially reported in Bradley et al (2020); however, additional selection tests have been coded for this audit. The employers that feature in the Times Top 100 Graduate employers guide are those that featured most in a sample of students' response to an open-ended question about which employers they think offers the best opportunities for gradates (The Times, 2019).…”

“…One possible explanation for the attendance levels at these events is that students do not need support as they are proficient with these tests. However, Bradley et al (2020) found that <50% of participants passed two commonly used psychometric tests, with 46.43% of final year psychology students passing verbal reasoning tests and only 16.47% passing numerical reasoning tests. Notably, the best predictor of passing the numerical reasoning test was prior experience in completing a numerical reasoning test.…”

“…The results of this study would seem to dismiss the notion that students do not attend career events relating to selection tests as they know how to complete these tests. It might be the case, however, that students do not know how frequently different selection tests are employed by graduate recruiters and have insufficient experience in completing these tests, hence accounting for the low pass rates observed by Bradley et al. (2020).…”

Exploring students’ and graduates’ attitudes to the process of transition to the labour market

“…While much of the wider literature is focused on the broader experience of transition from education to employment, this literature focuses on the technical processes through which this transition is achieved. It notes that employers use a wide range of recruitment techniques (Institute of Student Employers, 2021) and that graduates are advantaged in this process when they have prior experience of it (Bradley et al, 2021) and when they are able to correctly analyse what employers are looking for and so transform themselves into ‘ideal recruits’ (Gebreiter, 2019). And yet both the articulation of these ‘ideal recruits’ and the processes that are used to identify them are often flawed in ways that lead to social reproduction and an inequitable distribution of opportunities in the graduate market (Ingram and Allen, 2019; Pollard et al, 2015).…”