Latest research from The UK Graduate Careers Survey 2020, an independent survey of over 19,000 final-year students produced by High Fliers Research, shows that TARGETjobs was used by 39% of students from the ‘class of 2020’ while they were at university. This is almost a third more than any other graduate recruitment website in the UK.
We are delighted that all of our work has paid off – but how did we do it and how are we planning to build on our winning strategy to help you reach the students and graduates you want?
TARGETjobs is not just a jobs site: we empower all students to make better decisions about their future at every stage of their journey, from those who are totally undecided and daunted about their career to those who are about to receive job offers. We do this through a mix of comprehensive advice and career tools (including our Graduate Benchmark suite of practice aptitude tests and our downloadable CV templates); through promoting our TARGETjobs events and competitions; and of course through the vacancies we advertise.
Crucially, our content – whether video, infographic or text-based – is trustworthy and unbiased. The advice and insights we give are balanced, objective and timely, no matter what the jobs landscape. Our content is created by a team with expert knowledge of recruitment, careers advice and the employment market. Each piece is devised with a specific student or groups of students in mind – it is designed to answer a particular question or concern they have relevant to their individual circumstances. So, recently, for example:
Our team also works very closely with recruiters in our recruitment outsourcing business, GTI Recruiting Solutions – and with our careers services and employer partners – to incorporate the latest and most up-to-date insights into out content.
Behind the scenes, we have been working hard to ensure that our encyclopaedic content is more findable – whatever stage of the journey students are at.
In terms of our vacancies, we have been working very closely with employers to provide the details that our users – and by extension the search engine algorithms – like to see to make the most informed decisions. This is why our customer success managers will continue to ask you for as much detail as you can give around entry requirements, job locations and (where possible) salaries.
We have also used our GDPR-compliant data sets to provide bespoke recommendations to our registered users to direct them to the most relevant content.
We also use social media and emails to direct content to students who have an active interest in a particular topic. Audience remarketing is one of the key methods on social. Via email we use algorithms to ensure that content is communicated to the desired audience in the right way in an appropriate number of times – we always avoid spamming students with irrelevant material!
This is not to say that organic social media content isn’t an essential component of what we do. With organic, we ensure that our posts are not only appropriate to each medium, with consistent branding and images, but are also accessible to any audience who wants to share it: for example, careers advisers and student societies (who tend to be our most active followers on Twitter, for example).
From the autumn term TARGETjobs will be feeding careers content directly to students in their private university networks through TARGETconnect with the Career Discovery Feed. TARGETconnect is an operating system that is used by over 75 careers services to deliver an excellent experience for their users and maximise positive careers outcomes.
This means that TARGETjobs’ unique content offering will be reaching even further and we can personalise the right type of content for individual students when they need it the most, alongside providing virtual and face-to-face events, content, internships and roles.
