Employers 'Missing Out On Talent'

Top companies are recruiting from just six leading universities and "missing a large amount of graduate talent", the Universities Minister has said.

David Willetts told the government that employers were "fishing in an unduly narrow pool" of talent and risking discriminating against students from less prestigious institutions.

He criticised recruitment programmes for the practice when introducing the government's formal response to a review carried out by Prof Sir Tim Wilson, former vice-chancellor of Hertfordshire University, into the links between higher education and business.

Mr Willetts warned that degree classifications were "incredibly crude" and failed to take extra-curricular achievements into account, so employers should use new-style Higher Education Achievement Reports more, which break down academic grades and other activities and are being trialled at thirty universities.

It is believed as many as three-quarters of leading employers currently require good grades – a first class degree – as a minimum threshold for an interview.

Mr Willetts said: "Sometimes you find employers who complain that they can't find the graduates they’re looking for and how incredibly difficult it is to track them down. You talk to them and discover they're looking at about six universities. That is to miss out on a large amount of graduate talent."

He added: "We have got now an incredibly crude binary system in which basically a first or a 2:1 means a pass and a 2:2 or less, sadly, has significantly less value. That binary result from three years of higher education doesn't properly capture the range of achievements of students."

(NE)