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Graduate employers have 'learned from previous recessions'

Published: Thursday, 27 August 2009   Category: Employer News

Some graduate employers will keep up levels of recruitment this year because they have learnt the lessons of previous economic downturns, according to one expert.

Deloitte head of human resources Stephen Rolls spoke to the Guardian about the time it cut graduate recruitment in the 1990s, leading to a lack of accountants at the firm when the upturn came.

Fellow top graduate employer KPMG concurred, adding that although it is lowering its intake of university leavers to 600 this year, keeping the number as high as possible is the best option for a firm to take.

Sara Reading, head of graduate recruitment at the professional services company, told the news provider: "In 2002 we all cut back dramatically on numbers and then you couldn't find a chartered accountant for love nor money."

PricewaterhouseCoopers, which constantly appears first in the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers list, recently told Personnel Today that directors should do more to make university leavers aware of the positions available to them.