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Graduate job recruitment – From fish in a barrel to go fish

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First printed in University World News 03 July 2021

The graduate jobs outlook still looks bleak for students who graduated earlier this year and for those graduating in the summer. Just-in-time recruitment, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, digitisation and artificial intelligence are all combining against the background of a global pandemic and economic recession.

In response and as we emerge from COVID-19, we see a new breed of careers information advice and guidance better suited to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous or ‘VUCA’ world we find ourselves in.

It was not too long ago that thousands of students attended face-to-face graduate fairs with numerous graduate employers in a bid to land their dream job. It was a scenario that was reminiscent of the early 1900s phrase ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ because nobody could miss – employers knew where the students would be and the students knew where to go to get a job.

But when nobody can travel and there are fewer jobs, the game changes and is more like the guessing, bluffing and occasional skill associated with the card game ‘Go Fish’.

In the United Kingdom in 2020, at least 30% of university students lost a job or an offer of a job between March and April after the sharpest monthly increase in unemployment on record. At the same time, competition for graduate jobs is at an all-time high: With graduate job openings falling by 77% since the beginning of the year, there are on average 100 graduates vying for every role.

At least 20% of Britain’s biggest employers have suspended their graduate recruitment selection processes and stopped making graduate job offers and experts say the true scale of the damage inflicted on new graduates will not be fully realised until next year.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has warned that graduate overqualification has reached “saturation point” and squeezes lower-qualified workers out of jobs. It has bemoaned the crude approach to addressing the UK’s poor productivity growth with a “conveyor belt of graduates”.

There are fears that the situation is unsustainable, given that the government estimates that 45% of university graduates will not earn enough to repay their student loans.

The situation is no better elsewhere in the world: according to the Institute of Student Employers’ summer 2020 report, COVID-19: Global impacts on graduate recruitment, the pandemic is having a profound and damaging impact on the global economy. Many countries are reporting dramatic rises in levels of unemployment and there is growing evidence that these changes are having a disproportionate impact on young people.

The report explores how these economic changes are impacting graduate recruitment in 21 countries, with results broadly reflecting the issues in the UK graduate jobs market.

Career services must die

The solutions are challenging, but were foreshadowed in 2013 by Andy Chan, vice president for innovation and career development at Wake Forest University. He gave a TEDx talk, “Career Services Must Die”, where he challenged colleges and universities to completely rethink the traditional delivery of career services. Seven years later, he did an update.

He says: “Sadly, not much has changed at the majority of college campuses; career services continue on pretty much as before – with dissatisfied students, alumni and employers having to struggle on their own. True breakthroughs in career services will come when higher education embraces career as part of its academic core instead of a fringe student affairs offering.”

The reality is that some universities have been treading water as far as careers education is concerned, but now we do see a sudden shift. As is often the way, necessity is the mother of invention.

Changing careers education

There is and will always be a place for face-to-face or virtual careers fairs, CV workshops, mock interviews and assessments, but it seems like the stage is now set for innovation and out of the box thinking.

So here are some thoughts on reinventing careers education at university:

• First and foremost, careers information advice and guidance should be for all students, regardless of disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion or sexual orientation, whichever country they are from or heading to post-graduation.

• Careers guidance needs to be well informed by robust graduate outcomes data and insight, graduate destinations, benchmarked employability metrics and up-to-date labour market information for both the country of study and also for major overseas student markets, for example, China, India and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region.

• It will be important to personalise careers information advice and guidance and establish from the outset where in the world students are looking for their first job, for example, in their country of study or elsewhere. Careers advice will differ depending on their preference. It is likely that Asia will bounce back from the recession far quicker than Europe, so could there be exciting opportunities for graduates from other regions further afield.

• There will be a need to manage student expectations because in the present situation they may not initially walk into their dream job. However, a stop gap role working in an alternative industry or non-graduate job may provide them with valuable experience. In fact, speaking to many graduate recruiters in both Asia and the UK, many focus more on a candidate’s part-time work than they do on their degree during interviews.

• Widening graduates’ horizons is essential, for example, finance roles are not just available in banks. In Malaysia, oil and gas giant Shell employs over 1,000 accountants. For many employers, degree discipline is less important than one would think. They are looking at a level of education, but more importantly an attitude and resilience, which should be available in abundance in today’s graduates who have survived the pandemic and gained their degree.

• Students need to be given techniques and tips to find jobs that are not advertised, obvious or may not even exist yet. Effective account mapping and outreach to hiring managers and section managers could be a way of securing a job that has not even been advertised. This year’s graduates are going to have to be ‘job makers’ not just ‘job takers’.

• Students will have to think out of the box and commit time and energy to their own enterprise, join the gig economy and-or become a freelancer. This requires a different set of skills and commercial acumen that most employers find desirable in new recruits.

So, this and next year’s job search for both employers and graduates will, unfortunately, not be like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. It will require new skills and a new way of thinking and navigating complex labour markets and employer needs.

Like ‘Go Fish’, you will be dealt your hand and must bring your wit, ability and judgement to bear to compete with other graduates in a fiercely competitive market.

For higher education, a focus more on employability alongside increasing resources in this vital area of development will not only add value to their students at a time when many are increasingly questioning the value for money of their tuition fees, but also equip them with new, more innovative skills to be successful in a VUCA world.

Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge and Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD.

Image by tomekwalecki from Pixabay

Go compare – the emerging threat to higher education

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First published in University World News on 22 May 2021

Commodification is increasingly likely to be a word that universities need to recognise, understand and apply to their business planning as technology levels the playing field for international student recruitment.

Investopedia tells us that it means ‘a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other goods of the same type’. When you put it alongside Clayton Christensen’s ‘jobs to be done’ and the growing availability of university comparison or application sites, it’s easy to see emerging comparisons with the marketplace for car insurance.

The point about the ‘jobs to be done’ approach is that it highlights that the purpose of buying a particular good or service is to ‘make progress in specific circumstances’. For most international students (and increasingly home students) the purpose of getting a degree is to get a job and to have decent career prospects.

Higher education may want students to study for love of a subject, but the harsh reality for a generation that is poorer than its parents is that this does not seem to be leading to what they need.

A world where outcome is all that counts

A 2013 report by Oliver Wyman shows that, in the United Kingdom, price comparison websites (PCWs) were securing 60% of new motor insurance policies after starting up just a decade before. It suggests that many people were content to make their purchasing decision in this way rather than studiously interrogate the terms and conditions of every company individually.

There is no doubt that the ability to consider price alongside any other factors was vital in the rise of such sites. Moreover, the report found that the reality was that many of the insurance products were virtually indistinguishable.

Choosing a university may not be exactly the same as choosing car insurance, but aggregator sites could present dozens of business and finance courses that all end with a degree from an institution.

In the case of the UK these are accredited by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). The QAA Quality Mark or Review Graphic shows that the provider has “met or exceeded the UK expectations for quality and standards in their QAA review”. In principle, every UK university with this seal of approval has degrees with equal status, but they offer them at significantly different prices.

The great and the good of higher education may be shaking their heads at this and thinking of Lord Darlington’s quote from Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan about ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. But, in a situation where the customer has access to alternatives at the touch of a button, they have the means to determine the price they are willing to pay for the outcome they want.

Lord Darlington’s remark was about the nature of a cynic and it is arguable that young people are increasingly sceptical about the value of higher education.

Price, grades and rankings as differentiators

Institutions will undoubtedly look for ways of distinguishing themselves, but there are very few that have the financial muscle or marketing wit to be able to do so on a global scale.

It was not unknown before the internet for lowly institutions to inflate the tuition fees of their courses to international students on the basis that ‘price is a proxy for quality’. Better accessibility to information and ubiquitous university rankings have put a halt to that ploy so there will be a need for different tactics.

Entry qualifications, which are often seen as a signal of a quality institution, could become a way of communicating quality. But it has become clear that, with the number of universities going SATs free in the United States and the propensity for UK universities to be very flexible with international students, this is shaky ground.

It’s made even more complex by pathway operations that will offer international students a route to entry based on getting the required language level and passing the pathway’s own academic tests.

It would also seem counterproductive for most institutions to try to distinguish themselves by having high tariff entry points on a comparison site. Student matching may be sophisticated, but there is limited scope for nuance about such a defining piece of information and losing volume is not something that most institutions can afford to do.

Trying to impress with output grades is an equally risky business given the potential for grade inflation and the ability of institutions to decide how many of their students get ‘good degrees’.

University ranking may offer a different sort of quality test for students and, whether you love them or hate them, they have become a popular measure of distinction. However, research from the 2020 QS International Student Survey, recently presented at the Universities UK International Higher Education Forum, showed that there is a significant mismatch between the way rankings are compiled and the perceptions of students.

Prospective international students were asked to rank, in order of importance, what they thought a university’s good ranking indicated about the institution.

The top result was that 72% believe graduate employment rate is the most important factor. This was even above the 69% mark for the qualification level of staff members at the institution and 64% for student satisfaction. How a university is perceived by employers was deemed important by 49%, above the 48% for the number of citations in academic journals.

In short, students believed that employment outcomes and employer views were more important than staff quality, student satisfaction and research publications.

Price, ranking and employability

In that context it is disappointing that no current rankings include international student graduate employment as an input.

Within the QS World University Rankings, “employer reputation”, which is not the same as graduate employment rate but could provide some indication, accounts for just 10% of the measure. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2021 methodology did not include any element related to international employability or graduate outcomes.

Government-mandated graduate outcomes data collected in the majority of countries are usually only published with responses from domestic students. As the vast majority of international students – in the UK the estimate is 85% or more – still return to their home country, it would be inaccurate and misleading to use them as a guide to international student employability.

With rankings publishers forming partnerships with agents, aggregators and other interested parties to gain international student eyeballs, it is important for them to pay more attention to this important area.

International student graduate outcomes are being collected by private organisations and would bring real added value that is demonstrably aligned with the aspirations of students willing to invest to study abroad.

Without incorporating this key metric, the rankings will remain more of a vanity contest between institutions than a relevant and useful guide to applicants.

Price, ranking and international student employability are likely to become the key measures of a university’s value proposition when degree information is simple to compare and most institutions are obliged to engage with the aggregator sites.

Being a commodity product means a race to the bottom on price if that is where the institution chooses to compete.

Rankings are fickle, difficult to manage and leave the institution’s fate in the hands of publishers looking to satisfy their own ends. This is a good moment to really focus on providing the student customer with what they want and find ways to enhance value by proving that the institution provides a route to employability.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

All recruitment agent aggregators are not created equal

Alan Preece and Louise Nicol First printed in University World News, 12 April 2021

A flood of private money into the education sector is not necessarily a bad thing. Providing students with choice and value is positive and doing so with maximum effectiveness and efficiency makes sense. When a single ship in the Suez Canal can disrupt international trade and a pandemic makes global movement risky or near impossible, there is even more reason to use technology to bring people together.

That is the siren call of the ‘aggregators’ in higher education, but there have been recent challenges questioning their transparency, efficacy and level of genuine concern for students.

The possibility of consolidation to create an ‘Amazon of aggregators’ or a ‘Weibo of wannastudy’ leaves the prospect of market manipulation that is far from the interests of applicants. Regulation, compliance, oversight and the personal link between a university and its potential students are all good questions in this brave new world.

A rapidly evolving network

A clarification about different types of aggregator in the context of this article is needed: ‘Agent aggregators’ provide a platform that allows universities and agents to interact while ‘university aggregators’ provide a means for students to search and apply for universities directly.

The two types are a simplification of a complex and rapidly developing network where the lines are already blurring as different models prove more, or less, successful.

It’s partly a recognition that in some markets and at some levels of study, agents are dominant, while in others many students feel comfortable enough to proceed without a friendly hand guiding them through the process.

Agents themselves have also been ‘aggregators’ for many years, with sub-agency networks feeding into the main players or middlemen establishing themselves and coordinating dozens of geographically separated ‘mom and pop shops’. Pathway operators and universities have become particularly familiar with this environment as the only way to extend their reach without the overhead of an army of travelling salespeople.

The need for a quality framework

The reality is that an education institution often has no idea who first advised a student on their application or whether it was done in good faith.

The recently published BUILA (British Universities’ International Liaison Association) and UKCISA (UK Council for International Student Affairs) report, A Partnership for Quality: A route to a UK quality framework with education agents, produced by education consultancy Edified was commissioned prior to the meteoric rise of the aggregators, but provides a strong foundation for thinking about this development in the global higher education landscape.

Given the current pace of change, it’s troubling that a ‘route’ to a quality framework is only emerging when agents have been increasingly influential for three decades.

That is really the point that emerges from consideration of the risks and challenges of a rapidly developing new approach to recruiting students. Universities are ill-prepared to engage effectively to ensure that they are not being misrepresented or that students are not being misled.

The report’s timing is a little like the United Kingdom publishing a treatise on how to do better with horse drawn artillery in the 1914-18 war just as planes are fighting out the Battle of Britain in the skies above London in 1940.

Nothing new

Having established that aggregation is not really new, it’s important to note that neither is the notion of universities allowing commercial third parties to use their brands in the hope and expectation of lucrative recruitment from international markets.

Deals signed directly with agents have been common for decades and commercial pathway operators have made significant gains in the UK, Australia and the United States, while Canada is catching up. An example on the ‘student aggregator’ side is Studyportals which has been running since 2007, has over 3,700 participating universities and has branched out from ‘Mastersportal’ to have eight portal brands.

The real question is how universities should approach the new world of ‘agent aggregators’. It is possible to build upon the framework provided by the BUILA-UKCISA report to provide some direction.

The report identifies ‘Education Giants’ – Kaplan and Navitas – who have an international network of agents as well as other education business interests, ‘Multi-Nationals’ such as UKEAS and IDP which account for 10% of agents, and ‘Market Specialists’ which account for 5% of agents, for example, TC Global, which focuses on India, and Golden Arrow, which focuses on China.

Agent aggregators might be thought of as an ‘Exchange’, a ‘One Stop’ and a ‘Pathway’.

In the Exchange approach, taken by Adventus, the aggregator behaves like the ‘Booking.com’ for international higher education where agents receive 100% commission, students get more choice and institutions more applications.

In the One Stop approach, taken by ApplyBoard, the aggregator brings an agent network together with their university partners to offer students breadth of choice, but also takes a slice of the agency commission. They have additional services like English language testing, visa applications and advice to create a ‘one stop shop’.

In the Pathway approach, aggregators have a network of agents feeding their pathway programmes into universities. This is where the best known and longest standing commercial names sit – Study Group, INTO University Partnerships and Cambridge Education Group as well as parts of the Kaplan and Navitas operations.

The Outsourcers, such as MSM Media and Sannam S4, operate offices overseas for university partners to engage more effectively by using technology and streamlining services and agent engagement.

There is, unfortunately, one more group that could be called the Pretenders, who do not have the global office infrastructure, investment in training, technology platform, network of agents or university partners that they claim. A slick website purporting to have high levels of student traffic, a comprehensive network of agents spanning the globe and a multitude of university partners does not mean this is the reality. Strong marketing ‘does not an agent aggregator make’.

The need for oversight

The next and most urgent steps for the sector are to embrace the new world, but to act cautiously and coherently to ensure that both students and financially challenged institutions are not disadvantaged.

It is self-evident that they should steer clear of organisations copying others’ marketing campaigns and dressing up to look like legitimate outfits. But a degree of oversight by the Office for Students (in the UK) and similar bodies in other countries might be helpful in creating a level, legal and equally lucrative playing field.

It may even be a good step for aggregators to be obliged to capture and publish the views of students who are placed through their services.

Technology has provided a wonderful opportunity for students to have greater transparency, accessibility and support with finding the right university than ever before.

The biggest agents have long argued that they rely on reputation and repeat business to grow their organisation and that they invest heavily in supporting applicants. It is something that aggregators should be obliged to formalise and standardise.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay