DO you remember those cat food adverts: 8 out of 10 owners said their cats preferred it?
8 out of 10 cats is also a TV comedy show.
A quick search on Google reveals that more than eight out of ten toy factories in China’s manufacturing heartland are substandard. It’s also the number of teenagers in Vermont who don’t smoke. Yeah, right!
According to Reed, 8 out of 10 is the number of graduates who only use the internet to search for jobs. Reed say that just 3% scour newspaper advertisements for jobs, 57% spend less than an hour researching companies before interview and 9% of graduates don’t do any research prior to interviews. Welcome to the information age!
80% of respondents to Reed’s poll also claim to be avid users of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Hey, guess what? That’s 8 out of 10! Whilst the lack of research time put in by the Facebook generation suggests laziness, Reed say that it does appear that graduate jobseekers need more information provided in job descriptions and from recruitment consultants. Training and development information scores highest on the wish list. These demands seem fair enough. Competition for the best graduates is tough. With vacancies greatly outnumbering experienced jobseekers, fast-track graduates are needed to refill the talent pool. In shipping, especially the shipbroking and chartering market, employers are competing with other industries for top talent.
The end result of all this is that graduate salaries have risen. £25-30,000 is now the norm for commercial graduate vacancies in shipping. This is considerably higher than a few years ago, but still below the banking market, which routinely pays £35,000 and above for new starters. At Spinnaker we conducted our own survey and found that 8 out of 10 people only use shippingjobs.com to search for jobs. We would like to thank our mums for taking part in the survey. Your complimentary shippingjobs post-it notes are on the way.
