Looking for a job? This study by Gradweb gives great insight in how the hiring landscape is looking these days. A must-read if you are on a job hunt or if you are simply curious as to what the nature of future talent will be in the workplace.
The Future Talent Insights Report is a benchmarking tool that analyses recruitment campaigns against specific sectors and the wider Future Talent market. With the imminent publication of the 2015 Future Talent Insights Report we look back on some of the highlights of last year’s report based on these findings.
The 2014 report continues to highlight a significant disparity in terms of gender, in terms of overall applications – 64.07% for men versus 35.45% for women. Banking and financial services, engineering and automotive are well represented which could account for some of the skew however most importantly the same trend appears as last year in regards to the conversion ratio, a significant indicator to assess any discrimination within the recruitment process. We can confidently say that the employers taking part in the research have the correct approach to recruiting for gender diversity.
Unfortunately the same male dominated disparities remain in terms of sectors such as automotive, banking and financial services, engineering and property. These sectors appear to have the largest gap between the two gender groups. In fact, the only sector where women make up a higher percentage than men is in FMCG (46% male & 53% female), while the Public Sector (58% male & 41% female) and Retail (57% male & 43%) track better than our overall application and hiring percentages for women.
Applications for disabled graduates have continued to increase this year from 1.97% during 2010-11 to 2.38% in 2012-13. The hires percentage is 3.23% compared with 2.65% in 2010-11. Unfortunately this still falls below the 9% of graduates who are registered disabled, which raises concerns that either disabled job seekers are not declaring that they have a disability or they are less confident in finding employment with corporate organisations and therefore don’t apply in the first instance.
Encouragingly the conversion rates for disabled graduates are significantly better than that of candidates with no disability – 50:1 versus 69:1. With this in mind, we would urge disabled graduates to have more confidence in declaring their disability when applying for positions.
Based on the figures for the application and hire percentages for ethnic minorities, there are certain clear trends that we can observe from this year’s data.
Since 2010-11 the number of Chinese applications and hires has increased significantly, rising from 4.11% and 2.45% respectively to 7.48% and 5.71%. This however is against the backdrop of a huge reduction in ‘Asian’ application volumes, falling from 28.05% and 12.65% in 2010-11 to 15.54% and 10.4% in 2012-13.
The biggest increase in applications came from White – Other, suggesting the impact of inter-country migration within the European economic zone continuing to influence the UK labour market, while the White – British hire percentage fell (down from 67.7% to 60.91%) in spite of applications rising to 42.32%.
What is disappointing to see is that little has changed for Black applicants. Although hiring volumes continue to be broadly in line with the overall ethnic minority mix, applications from black candidates achieve by far the worst conversion rate – 70:1 when compared with just 20:1 for white applications.
It is clear that more work with companies’ is required in the recruitment process of ethnic minority candidates.
GradWeb is one of the UK’s leading graduate, entry-level and volume outsource recruitment specialists boasting an international, cross-sector client portfolio. To register your interest in the 2015 report click here.
Ms. Career Girl
Ms. Career Girl was started in 2008 to help ambitious young professional women figure out who they are, what they want and how to get it.
