Acadiate Releases Report on Graduate Student Employability with HR Professionals, Hiring Managers and Recent Hires

Recruiters give the typical University Graduate job application a failing grade

TORONTO, ONTARIO (PRWEB) JUNE 23, 2016

Acadiate has just released an in-depth Focus Group Report on “Student Recruitment with HR Professionals, Industry Recruiters, and Recent Student Hires”. Acadiate is a Student and Alumni Employment Success Platform for Higher Education that integrates an industry leading job application format with effective career mentorship that increases the appeal of job applications to recruiters by over 2X times.

Acadiate conducted two separate focus groups hosted at Microsoft Canada’s head-office, organized with the help of HalTech, Halton Region’s Innovation Center. The first group was with Human Resource Managers and independent recruiters, and then separately with recent hires of university and college graduates. The findings from the recruiter’s focus group rated on average the typical new graduate job application as a 3 of 10. David Murdoch, Co-Founder of Acadiate stated, “Hiring managers are trying to quickly assess a candidate’s skills, knowledge and X-Factors that make candidates unique and how that fits their needs in less than 10 seconds.” He further stated, “Recruiters advised that new graduates are not successfully tailoring their job applications to help recruiters quickly see the match of skills to job requirements, and interesting enough, the very act of tailoring their job application is one of the main factors recruiters look for to determine the candidate’s passion, maturity and confidence.”

Customized and relevant applications are highly valued by recruiters. Acadiate’s Showcase format is designed to support greater personalization and is able to present more meaningful and deeper information on candidates than the traditional cover letter and resume. “Whenever I am playing a recruiting role, I want to make sure I understand what students aspire for, what expertise they want to develop and how my team and I can enable the best learning environment for them. These elements are usually absent from traditional resumés and job applications, preventing hiring managers from looking at individuals and their wholeness, who they are and what their natural talents are. There is a huge opportunity for graduates to differentiate themselves by investing more time in building their job applications in emerging platforms like Acadiate.” said Andre Leidenheimer Ruiz Soler, HalTech Advisor and Marketing Director at Microsoft Canada.

Acadiate’s format is sparking interest among recruiters and institutions because it allows them to quickly scan job applications, but also quickly assess additional skill sets, personality and unique factors that can make a candidate stand out. Recruiters rated Acadiate’s format an average of 8.3 out of 10, almost tripling a candidate’s job application appeal from the initial rating.

Acadiate enables students, new graduates, and young adults to present themselves in a deeper way, allowing recruiters to more broadly evaluate candidates. Acadiate’s showcase loads straight into an applicant’s resume, with a short overview and quick view of attached supplementary multi-media assets, documents and a cover letter video. The survey of recruiters found they rated the value of a Video Cover Letter as a 9 out of 10, suggesting that a short introductory video could be as valuable to a recruiter as a cover letter or resume in a standard job application. Zane Westmoreland, Co-Founder of Acadiate, stated, “Recruiter feedback indicated that mentored candidates have stronger self-awareness and clarity of what they want to accomplish in their career and when this is communicated in a video cover letter, these candidates really standout in the eyes of a recruiter.”

Higher education institutions are adopting Acadiate’s platform because of it’s ability to dramatically increase the career success of their graduates. Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto, Anthony Wensley had this to say about Acadiate, “Our students have found great value in the comprehensiveness of the Acadiate platform for developing and managing their interaction with potential employers and mentors”.

A copy of the report is available by contacting acadiate.com.

Acadiate Inc

Acadiate is a Student and Alumni Career Success platform that enables job applications to stand out from the competition using its industry leading Showcase Format. Acadiate is unique by supporting number of touch points by a school to help a student to methodically improve their employability, such as video cover letters, classroom mock applications, mentorship from alumni, job application tracking, job application analytics, and more. Unique to Acadiate is its focus on the student and their needs. Acadiate base accounts are free to everyone and are available at acadiate.com.

HalTech

HalTech is at the nexus of Halton Region’s innovation ecosystem, working with technology companies to accelerate innovation for business growth. Our mission is straightforward: we help technology entrepreneurs and companies to develop and transform their good ideas and product innovations into well positioned, growing ventures. haltech.ca

Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology, University of Toronto

The focus of the CCIT program is on the generation, diffusion, and social impact of new technologies, and how media and technologies interact with commerce, culture and communication. The CCIT program combines academic courses in the arts and social sciences taught at the University of Toronto Mississauga with hands-on applied courses in digital media and technology taught at both UTM and the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, offering an appealing opportunity for students to concurrently obtain both an undergraduate bachelor of arts degree and a Certificate in Digital Communications from Sheridan.