Graduates suffer six-year freeze in starting salaries

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UK employers have frozen graduate starting salaries for a sixth consecutive year, according to the latest XpertHR Benchmarking research on the graduate labour market. Despite ongoing economic recovery and an upturn in graduate recruitment activity, more than two-thirds of employers reported a freeze in graduate starting salaries between 2013/14 and 2014/15. Among the minority who have raised graduate starting salaries, most increases from the previous year are tightly bunched between 1% and 3%. Across the whole economy, the median graduate starting salary is £23,500 for 2014/15, while the mean or average figure is slightly lower, at £23,304. By broad industry sector, private-sector-services organisations offer the highest median graduate starting salaries, at £24,000. This compares with median graduate starting salaries of £23,500 in manufacturing firms and £20,000 in the public sector. XpertHR pay and benefits editor Sheila Attwood said: "The freeze in graduate starting salaries coincides with a period of low pay rises across the board. In 2009, XpertHR recorded more than half of organisations freezing pay, and in the five years since, pay awards have broadly been worth a median 2% - well below the norm of between 3% and 3.5% seen in the years before the recession." Starting salaries may be frozen, but graduate recruitment activity is on the rise with four-fifths of employers currently trying to recruit. This is up from around two-thirds of respondents to XpertHR’s two previous annual surveys of graduate recruitment trends. However, many respondents are unhappy with the calibre of graduates from UK universities. Half say the main problem is poor qu