Employer Perspectives on Recruiting Graduates: A Detailed Analysis

This report examines employer perspectives on recruiting graduates, highlighting differences between large enterprises and small to medium-sized industries. While larger enterprises often recruit graduates, smaller companies may prefer non-graduates due to factors like salary expectations and a focus on internal talent development. Employers often recruit reactively, filling vacancies as they arise, and may find it more cost-effective to train existing staff. Practical experience is increasingly valued, diminishing the importance of theoretical knowledge alone. Employers seek graduates with strong communication, numeracy, and teamwork skills, but many struggle to find the right fit, citing issues such as a lack of independence and a gap between expected skills and practical abilities.

RESEARCH FOR ENTERPRISE

Employer perspectives on recruiting graduates with/without work experience.
This section is going to explain the perspective of the employers on recruiting graduates.
The larger enterprises generally opt for the graduates for work but the scenario is totally different
for small and medium scale industries. McMurray et al. (2016) stated employers generally need a
bulk of employees and as a result, they firstly prefer non-graduates. Although they hire a very
small number of graduates for their organizations. Some of the very common perspectives of
employers on graduates with or without work experience are mentioned as follows:
 Most of the organizations start recruiting on a reactive basis that is recruiting on when
there are a vacancy and many times they do not have any vacancy for fresher.
 The salary expectation of the graduates is generally high as a result most of the
employers on the small scale industries prefer graduates with no work experience (Smith
et al. 2015).
 Most of the employers think it is better to train and grow talent from the employees they
have. As a result instead of hiring graduates, they give training to their own staffs and
promote them to senior positions when the time comes (Matsouka and Mihail, 2016).
 It has been seen that for smaller or medium companies the requirement for a graduate
student comes after 2-3 years. They basically need the working force who are going to
push forward the production or services of the organization.
 Employers now demand practical experiences. As a result, the demands of employees
having theory knowledge learnt over university have diminished over the years.
There are numerous organizations growing up each year and everyone compete for the
best graduates to work for the organization which makes it difficult for them to select for that
one vacancy. Almost 67% of the total employers have agreed that they find it very difficult to

find the right graduate for their organization (Sarkar et al. 2016). Some of the main reasons for
not hot hiring the graduate students are mentioned in the following points:
 They are very less dependent and they need guidance at all time.
 The quality of the written work is very poor.
 There is a gap between their expected talents and practical life skills.
In a survey, it is seen that the employers give value to certain skillset among the
employees such as effective communication, numeracy as well as a team player. Having the
theory knowledge is important but employers give much more priority to technical knowledge,
effective communication.

References
Matsouka, K. and Mihail, D.M., 2016. Graduates’ employability: What do graduates and
employers think?. Industry and Higher Education, 30(5), pp.321-326.
McMurray, S., Dutton, M., McQuaid, R. and Richard, A., 2016. Employer demands from
business graduates. Education+ Training, 58(1), pp.112-132.
Sarkar, M., Overton, T., Thompson, C. and Rayner, G., 2016. Graduate employability: Views of
recent science graduates and employers. International Journal of Innovation in Science and
Mathematics Education (formerly CAL-laborate International), 24(3).
Smith, S., Smith, C. and Caddell, M., 2015. Can pay, should pay? Exploring employer and
student perceptions of paid and unpaid placements. Active Learning in Higher Education, 16(2),
pp.149-164.