Choosing your employer - there is a choice

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• Recognise it happens
  Graduate recruitment brochure and adverts are often part of a wider PR campaign to raise the company profile investors, customers and competitors.

   

• Get off the beaten track
  Don't just rely on the traditional graduate sources of information. Think of some alternative sources of information about firms. Use the internet and your university libraries to find out as much as you can about companies. Good sources include: The Financial Times and other broadsheets, professional journals, trade magazines.

   

• Get an inside picture
  The best way of finding out about a company is to have worked there yourself. If you are still an undergraduate, you could target a particular organisation for your dissertation, project or a vacation job. Second best is to get in contact with someone who works there. You can try your CAS some keep contact with recent graduates for this very reason. Your university lecturers may have contacts with recent graduates or with staff unconnected with the recruitment process.

   

• Resourceful researching
  Go to company presentations and recruitment fairs armed with probing questions. In particular, ask recent graduates specific questions about the organisation and how it has met their expectations. If you get through to an assessment centre, you will probably have an opportunity to do this at some length.

Other published sources about employers include books such as The 100 Best Companies to Work for in the UK.( Nightingale Multimedia, Millennium Edition). This book measures organisations on the basis of: pay, benefits, communication, training, career development and morale. It also lists the number of graduates employed each year and other facts such as the annual staff turnover rate.