Assessment format:
PowerPoint presentation with explanation notes.
Assessment task:
Select two contrasting UK organisations, which you have identified as significant graduate recruiters. Preferably, these organisations will be familiar to you from a careers fair or similar. Your task is to advise a prospective candidate (a recent graduate), who is attracted by both types of organisations.
How to approach the assessment task:
Recent graduates, as well as many employees further on in their careers, may be attracted to very different sectors of the labour market. For instance, someone may be training to work as a lawyer, while the same time being attractive to the creative industries, such as PR and Marketing. They may also be conflicted between working for a large corporation or an SME.
In selecting two contrasting UK organisations, which the contrast may be between sectors (such as banking and PR), or it may be that one is a large corporate, and the other is a very small organisation.
| Marking criteria:
|
Weight |
| Appropriate choice of two contrasting organisations | 10% |
| Issues relating to online platforms
(relevant to the chosen organisations) |
20% |
| Advice to respective candidate
(relevant to the chosen organisations, how practical the advice is, consideration of career implications) |
30% |
| Presentation of findings
(clear and concise, graphs / visual aids relevant and legible, speakers’ notes coherent) |
20% |
| Westminster Harvard Referencing System
(cited on slides / equivalent media) |
10% |
| Individual contribution
(credibility of input from the Careers Fair and research) |
10% |
| Total | 100% |
You are in the position of advising a prospective candidate, a recent graduate, who is attracted by both types of organisation. Decide what advice you would give a person on maintaining their online presence, particularly in the early stages of their career. You should consider as a minimum LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms as relevant platforms.
In order to determine the best advice, you should prepare questions for both recruiting organisations. Your advice should meet the requirements of both types of organisation. You will need to understand what the recruiters are looking for when hiring recent graduates and early career employees. This will include online behaviours, which would jeopardise their application.
The main focus should be on features and behaviour that will appeal to both types of organisations when recruiting. This is likely to involve compromise, as one type of organisation may look for a more active online presence, which may be viewed less favourably by the other type of organisation.
Learning outcomes:
- Manage your own career development, including labour market analysis, skills of being interviewed and managing one’s online presence.
- Identify and plan for the human resource needs of a department, taking into account labour market analysis.
- Compare and contrast main approaches to identify, attract, develop, motivate and retain appropriate staff.