Graduate recruitment: what universities have the best employability?

If you work in graduate recruitment, then the list below may be of interest to you as an app has ranked the Universities which have the best employability rate.

This information comes from Debut Careers, an app designed for students and graduates.

The top 10 best Universities by employability (overall ranking/10) are:
  • University of Oxford – 7.92
  • University of Cambridge – 7.27<
  • Imperial College London – 7.24
  • Lancaster University – 7.09
  • University of Nottingham – 6.87
  • University of Exeter – 6.63
  • University of York – 6.40
  • University of East Anglia – 6.33
  • University of Reading – 6.24
  • University of Bristol – 6.13

 

The top three Universities by career service spend (per student 2018/19) are:

  • University College Birmingham – £199.73
  • Liverpool Hope University- £150.38
  • Lancaster University – £145.39

 

Kim Conner Streich, marketing director of Debut Careers said:

We are seeing Universities providing more and more online, as well as checking in with students and doing tutoring groups online, which is all great support.

Graduates can use their time to focus on future positive prospects; some tasks could include updating and editing your CV or even practising video interviews and the skills that go with it.

In February 2020, HRreview interviewed Ashley Thomas, talent and organisational development manager at British Heart Foundation (BHF) regarding graduate recruitment.

We asked him “Most graduates CVs can look very similar, how do you identify talent and what process do you use?”

Mr Thomas said:

We do have a combination of things, we still use psychometric profiles, we do ability testing as part of our essential criteria that we use to make sure we are picking someone with a good brain. The charity sector needs people with good creative fast thinking brains, but more than that for us, what we really look for is some sort of genuineness, some form of real clear purpose about why individuals want to come work in our sector in particular. I think we are relatively flexible at BHF in thinking more broadly what does talent mean, we try to challenge the idea because we have a sector which is predominately white, middle-class and well-educated. We want to look for just little points of difference when we look at CVs or when we are looking at video interviews. We are trying to tap in to the thing that might not be so obvious but its really personal to that individual and reflects what they were capable of achieving in their given circumstances.

In order to put this list together, Debut Careers submitted Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to each UK University to find out how much their career service spend (taken in to account average graduate salaries and employment levels) to reveal which UK Universities are working hard to support their students.

Darius is the editor of HRreview. He has previously worked as a finance reporter for the Daily Express. He studied his journalism masters at Press Association Training and graduated from the University of York with a degree in History.