Recruiting New Grads: Canadian Trends and Practices

Guest post by Paul Smith

Recruiting new graduates offers access to untapped potential when it works, but it may also expose employers to significant risk and expense when it doesn’t. Clearly, you want to maximize the potential while diminishing the risk, but achieving the desired balance can be tricky.

Valid and reliable information can make a difference, so allow me to introduce The Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers’ (CACEE) Campus Recruitment and Benchmark Survey.

Since 2007 CACEE has produced an annual report on the new graduate recruitment practices of employers throughout Canada. The survey details the level of full-time and co-op/internship hiring, the average salaries paid to new graduates, and the anticipated change in starting salary levels for the coming recruiting season. Finally, the survey establishes a number of benchmarks for recruiting practices used by Canadian employers.

The 2012 Report was released in October, and featured a number of key findings. Here are a few highlights:

• At a time of unemployment and underemployment for post-secondary graduates, recruiters in a number of sectors again experienced difficulty meeting their hiring goals. Engineering positions once again take the top spot on this list, with 28.6% of positions unfilled. Banking in its various forms also experienced difficulty, combining to account for 18% of vacancies.
• The average wage for university new graduates recruits (the largest contingent of hires in the survey) in Canada in 2012 was $51,014, down 5% from the 2011 average of $53,717.
• The average acceptance rate for offers to new college recruits was approximately 81%, a significant increase over the level recorded in 2010.

There is a lot more information available; some of it is quite detailed and broken down by region. If you want to know what other employers are doing in their new grad hiring, you’ll want to read this report. You can visit www.cacee.com for more information or to buy a copy.

And if you want to know more about the effective recruitment and retention of international students / new Canadians, please join us in Moncton on April 5^th for a conversation on “Building Atlantic Canada’s Workforce through International Recruitment.” You can contact me at Pauls@cacee.com for more info. 

Author: Paul Smith

Paul Smith is the Executive Director of The Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers.

 

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