Wanted - bright, literate, numerate young people of graduate quality willing to work either part-time or seasonally in a wide variety of demanding and responsible positions. Could lead to a full-time contract."
This in essence is the attraction of job shops to both students and employers. Run by many but not yet all universities, this relatively new service offers students flexible hours, an income, and CV-boosting work experience, while employers gain access to a highly intelligent, well-motivated temporary workforce.
"Job shops are academia's realistic response to the fact that students do work," says Andrew Jackson, who manages the new student employment service at City University in London. "The job shop allows the university to limit the number of hours advertised to 15 per week during term-time, to make sure employers are paying minimum wage, and to match the opportunities with the sort of work registered students have asked for."
To employers however, one of the great advantages of using a job shop is the fact that it allows them to trial students for future full-time employment, bypassing the considerable costs of the milk-round altogether.
"Trying out students on a look-see basis is right at the heart of our recruitment policy," says Donald Clark, chief executive of Epic Group, a company involved in e-government, e-business and e-learning. "In the last two years, out of 12 students given placements, five have gone on to work with us full-time."
"The primary aim of student employment services is to help students to graduate," says John Sander, head of the student employment service at Sussex University, one of the country's oldest job shops. "This is done by providing them both with some income and with commercial experience which ideally should be career-related. However, there can be no doubt that this service is a new way for students and employers to get together to consider post-university opportunities."
"Employers are definitely aware of the advantage of coming to us to get to students earlier," agrees Olwen Duncan, manager of the student employment service at Edinburgh University, who points to the fact that because job shops often deal with first-year students, small to medium-sized employers are reaching them virtually straight from school. And it is this size of firm that has most to gain, because they allow them to scoop off some of the cream before it gets sucked up by the giants of the milk-round.
Jean Rainy-Brown is private client director of Mackay, Stewart and Brown, a small firm of independent financial advisors based in Edinburgh. "We advertise at the university for someone to work over the summer," she says, "essentially to cover other staff holidays. But we also have the advantage of knowing that we are advertising to a pool of high achievers.
"If they like us and we like them, that could extend into part-time work in the following year, and possibly a permanent position after graduation. We have found two full-time advisers that way and it has saved us time and money over other recruitment methods."
The fact that smaller companies have a lot to gain from using job shops as a trial for new employees does not mean that blue chip names ignore them. They do, and a large student population may be instrumental in their decision to relocate offices. However, this type of highly branded organisation is often shy about admitting to using students in anything but administrative roles because the public still has a negative perception of student employees.
But the point at which student employment services may show their greatest potential is in the new software businesses which, in their early days, do not have the financial strength to commit to full-time contracts, but which still require a highly educated workforce.
"In the first year of trading it offered us great flexibility," says Alberto Schiannini of Babel, a new company which checks the foreign language versions of market- leading interactive entertainment products. "Students are educated, literate and in the same age group as the consumer, but they want limited hours or very seasonal work. This combination is unbeatable in our fast-moving environment. I would never consider finding anyone through the milk-round, it's too slow."
One of the biggest problems for job shops is that those seeking vacation work in one university's catchment area are often students who attend other universities. And as job shops are funded by individual universities, there is no financial incentive to help a competitor's students find work. This is a problem that employers are also keen to find a solution to.
"The biggest difficulty is the fact that an employer like us has to deal with individual universities and sometimes even individual faculties," says David Clark of Epic Group. "We are trying to persuade the government that what is needed is a nationwide website."
If this were to prove feasible, then job shops may yet change the face of graduate recruitment completely.
