Just 1% of employers believe the age discrimination regulations will have a major impact on graduate recruitment, research by Personnel Today’s sister publication IRS Employment Review has revealed.
More than one in four organisations (27%) did not believe the age laws, introduced on the 1 October, would have any impact at all on graduate recruitment.
The seventeenth annual IRS Graduate Recruitment Survey showed that almost half of businesses (46%) thought the new laws would only have a minor impact. About a quarter (26%) said it was too early to say or that they did not know what effect the regulations would have.
Neil Rankin, recruitment and retention editor for IRS Employment Review, said: “Graduate recruitment has survived the economic turbulence of recent years, demand is up and the Age Discrimination Regulations seem to have been revealed as a paper tiger, at least in the eyes of graduate recruiters themselves.
“Unless there is a serious economic shock during the coming months, graduate recruitment looks set for a relatively uneventful season – that is, if recruiters’ sanguine attitude towards the new anti-ageism legislation turns out to be well-founded.”
The study also found that starting salaries for new graduates have risen to a median of £21,000 this year.
But a typical graduate starting salary has only risen by 2.4% over the past 12 months, the research revealed.
Annual graduate salaries were found to run from as little as £12,500 to a maximum of £31,000.
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