Many UK businesses are finding it difficult to recruit skilled graduates

A new report from the Association for Graduate Recruiters has shown that 32% of businesses have struggled to find enough graduates to meet recruitment targets last year. The largest recruitment gap came from the engineering, transport and logistics industries missing recruitment targets by an amazing 80%.

The report which surveyed 214 of the UK’s largest employers including Barclays, IBM, McDonalds and PwC found that the number of companies that failed to recruit graduates had risen by more than a quarter in the last 12 months, despite record numbers of graduates finishing.

Collectively the businesses advertised over 21,000 new positions; however they failed to hit targets due to a perceived lack of skills from many graduates with companies complaining that graduate skill levels were not meeting requirements. The report shows that businesses did not feel the quality of applications were good enough, that graduates were not diligent enough when applying making too many mistakes or that they simply did not have the time and resources to re-train graduates that have skills missing.

The report also went on to highlight that they expect there will be a small drop in graduate jobs in 2012 down 1.2 on the previous year but argued that this was to be expected with current uncertain economic environment. There was some good news for graduates however as the average wage for graduates was expected to rise by 4% over the next year whereas it had remained static over the last few years.

Source: Pareto.co.uk, Friday 27th January 2012