Durham ranked sixth by grad employers

Durham has come sixth in a list of universities targeted by the UK’s largest graduate recruiters, according to a shock new survey.

The study by High Flier Research has discovered the majority of the UK’s top 100 graduate employers will target students at 20 or fewer universities, with 20% of firms having scaled back graduate recruitment funding compared with last year.

Durham was ranked sixth in the controversial list for 2012-13 after Warwick, Nottingham, Manchester, Cambridge and Bristol, but ahead of other top universities such as Oxford, Bath and LSE. Other highly rated universities such as St Andrews did not appear in the top 20. 

With Cambridge in fourth place and Oxford in seventh, many are shocked at how Warwick has come out on top.

Rather unexpectedly, the study also revealed a decrease in the number of graduate jobs available compared to last year, with entry-level graduate jobs falling by 0.8% over the year.

71% of the firms surveyed in the report claimed they were more likely to increase their use of social media to promote their graduate schemes than in previous years. However, a quarter of the firms said they would be decreasing the resources they put into traditional university career fairs.

According to the Graduate Market in 2013 report, 42% of the top firms stated that they were more likely to approach first year students than in previous years, with only 28% planning to target penultimate year students more than in the past.

Findings are based on research conducted in December 2012 with the UK’s top 100 graduate employers including BP, the Civil Service, IBM, Goldman Sachs, PwC, Google and HSBC.