It’s not just lonely hearts who are turning to speed-dating to snare
themselves ‘that special person’. City institutions are now using
‘speed-recruitment’ to land ‘that special employee’.
The first-ever speed-recruitment event takes place this Thursday in London.
It has been developed to meet accelerated demand from both top organisations
and graduate job-seekers this summer.
Despite record numbers graduating this year, hundreds of places on graduate training
schemes, due to start next month, are still unfilled, while the Association of
Graduate Recruitment reports the biggest increase in graduate vacancies since
2000.
Speed-recruitment will allow employers and graduate jobseekers to have
10-minute, face-to-face ‘taster’ interviews. Companies can pitch their
background information while graduates present their CVs, allowing both sides
to then decide if they want to take things a stage further.
Reed Graduates, the company that designed the event, said demand from the
City of London and the financial sector for new graduates had expanded
particularly quickly compared to 2003, and confirmed that big names such as
Deloitte and KPMG will be using speed-recruiting.
Martin Hickerton, team leader at Reed Graduates, said: "Leading
organizations are having real difficulties in recruiting the high calibre
graduates they need for their graduate trainee programmes this year. Having cut
back on formal graduate trainee programmes over the last few years, demand has
now returned. However many new graduates have not realised the full extent of
the opportunities now open to them amongst some of the most prestigious
employers in the country."
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Ruth Stokes, head of graduate recruitment at KPMG, said the company was
always looking for new and cost-effective ways to meet graduates.
"This is particularly important at the moment," she said. "We
have recently increased our targets numbers for this year resulting in us
having places still available on our graduate trainee schemes starting this
September and October."
