As a recruiter, it’s important to know the landscape of college recruiting. In a recent survey by CareerBuilder, that landscape is revealed. Today we’ll see what college student expectations are so you can appropriately gauge the effectiveness of your recruiting strategy.
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Which College Majors Are Being Hired
Demand for students with business and technical majors continues to be high among employers, and the following majors are the most in-demand at their firms:
- Business—35%
- Computer and information sciences—23%
- Engineering—18%
- Math and statistics—15%
- Health professions and related clinical sciences—14%
- Communications technologies—11%
- Engineering technologies—11%
- Communication and journalism—8%
- Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities—7%
- Science Technologies—7%
- Social Sciences—6%
- Biological and Biomedical Sciences—6%
- Architecture and Planning—6%
- Education—5%
Information technology (27%) and customer service jobs (26%) top the list of position types for which employers hiring recent college grads are recruiting. Opportunities also abound in finance/accounting (19%), business development (19%) and sales (17%).
What the Average Grad Makes Right Out of College
When it comes to pay, more than one-third of employers that plan to hire recent college graduates this year (37%) will offer higher starting salaries than they did last year. Fifty-three percent of employers expect no change in salary offers, and 11% expect a decrease in starting salaries.
More than one-half of these employers (52%) say they will make offers to students before they graduate. Expected starting salaries for recent graduates break down as follows:
- Under $30,000: 25%
- $30,000 to less than $40,000: 28%
- $40,000 to less than $50,000: 20%
- $50,000 and higher: 27%
These numbers are subject to change; the majority of employers (67%) say they are willing to negotiate salary offers when extending a job offer to a recent college graduate.
Survey Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder among 2,186 hiring and human resource managers aged 18 and over (full-time, non-self-employed, nongovernment employees) between February 10 and March 17, 2016 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset, based on their responses to certain questions). With a pure probability sample of 2,186, one could say with a 95 percent probability of accuracy that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 2.10 percentage points. Sampling error for data from subsamples is higher and varies.