However, recruitment is on the rise, says Simon Midgley

Final year students looking for their first job after graduating this summer will find themselves in one of the toughest job markets in the world. As many as 320,000 will graduate, only to discover that there are just 130,000 UK graduate-level vacancies.

And by the autumn, a quarter of these vacancies will already have been filled by last year’s graduates who are taking up deferred offers from 2009 or who have been in company internships. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that there could be as many as 80,000 of last year’s graduates still looking for suitable employment. So new university leavers will have to compete with 2009’s graduates and also with unemployed degree holders from earlier years, for the available jobs.

Those who do not get graduate-level employment will have to settle for non-graduate jobs, temporary work, volunteering, charity work or state benefits. “A huge number of people are applying for the remaining vacancies this year,” says Martin Birchall, managing director of graduate recruitment research company High Fliers Research.

Last year the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) reported that its member companies received an average of 49 applications for every graduate-level job. This year Carl Gilleard, the association’s chief executive, thinks that ratio will be even higher.

Mars and L’Oreal are averaging 100 applications per vacancy, Birchall adds. The competition is fierce. Dan Hawes, co-founder of the Graduate Recruitment Bureau, a Brighton-based graduate recruitment agency, says: “There is a great deal of despair out there.”

The Graduate Market in 2010, a report published by High Fliers, says that more than 60 per cent of student job hunters have little confidence that they will find a graduate position after university. However, the picture is not all gloomy. The report notes that leading UK firms have increased this year’s graduate recruitment target by 12 per cent in comparison with last year. And Hawes says that in the past three months he has seen many more companies hiring graduates.

Areas of significantly increased graduate recruitment are investment banking, accountancy, banking and retailing, according to High Fliers’ report. Two areas predicting fewer graduate vacancies are the public sector and engineering. The largest graduate recruiters in 2010, the report says, will be PricewaterhouseCoopers (1,039 vacancies), Deloitte (1,000 vacancies), the Army (735 vacancies), the Teach First scheme (650 vacancies), KPMG (650 vacancies) and the RAF (600 vacancies).

An AGR survey of member businesses suggests that areas where graduate recruitment will grow include the oil industry, consulting and business service firms, construction companies, retail, banking, investment banking and IT. Demand for graduates in the insurance industry and transport, however, will fall.

Graduates in some disciplines have an edge. Hawes says: “Numerate graduates are in huge demand, particularly computing graduates. And people with vocational degrees appeal to companies because they are business-ready.”

Work internships enhance commercial awareness and make final-year students more marketable. A good CV is also essential. “Recruiters often spend only 30 seconds looking at a CV,” Hawes says. “So it is paramount that yours stands out. Just two pages, easy to read and in chronological order in terms of qualifications and work experience. You need to show that you can do the job and are keen.”

University is coming to an end and it is time to face the “real world”. But what if you do not have a job lined up? “Act now,” says Richard Irwin, senior consultant in the Recruitment Centre of Expertise at PricewaterhouseCoopers. PwC, currently number one in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers, typically recruits about 1,000 graduates a year and there are still vacancies for September’s intake. Negative coverage in the press may have misled graduates about what opportunities are out there and caused them to disengage unnecessarily from the job market, Irwin says. “You need to understand what is available to you.”