Will firms repeat their graduate mistakes?
Worrying news this morning from the recruitment frontline – financial services companies will recruit 15% fewer graduates this year. It’s no surprise: so chilled are the economic winds that recruitment freezes have replaced hiring hotspots.
But the upshot of the Income Data Services survey is worrying nonetheless.
In the same way that markets quickly forget and unlearn lessons (what price another bank gets itself in all sorts of trouble 20 years hence after an expansion spree funded by cheap credit), so do recruiters.
Accountancy firms have struggled in the last few years to recruit enough bright young things to do the work that their clients have demanded. It’s depressed their earnings.
More enlightened senior partners have admitted to me in the recent past that they had made a mistake in choking off their graduate recruitment programmes during the last recession.
The negative effects in the good times outweighed the benefits of lower headcount in the bad times.
Will firms (and others) make the same mistake this time? We’ll at least some already are. A
ccording to the IDS survey (of almost 100 private and public sector graduate employers) at least two groups have put a graduate recruitment freeze in place.
I just hope they’re not accountancy firms.
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