We developed a picture of why students are / are not actively seeking careers in particular sectors and listed recommendations regarding positioning and promotion.

Our research comprised of interviews with gatekeepers, online questionnaire-based surveying and campus-based focus groups.

Meeting students and university staff from all the top universities and business schools was definitely a highlight!

This finding, by Gartner, has been linked to changing demographics and the growth in the number of devices which can support social media interaction.

In the fast-moving graduate recruitment market this evolution is set to be all the more dramatic, with recruiters already setting the standard, showing the rest of business how to implement social media effectively to deliver to business objectives. While cautious at first, several of the biggest legal and financial firms, as well as smaller, more specialised recruiters are embracing the opportunities it presents, developing innovative and strategic approaches, and realising real returns on their investments.

StudentBoard is currently developing research into student opinion on the development of social media marketing by recruiters. In this fast-moving and trend-savvy market, these insights are bound to surprise.

StudentBoard conducted both online and offline research for ICAP, and we found that students often didn’t recognize them as being a financial services organization. Furthermore, we discovered that although in recent years they have become more global, certain regions needed better representing.

With our findings they were able to build a much stronger brand to take on campus, and hone their key message -that ICAP offer a huge range of opportunities, operating on a truly international level, and not just in broking.

We therefore selected students from our campus ambassador network at Morgan Stanley’s target universities with connections in clubs and societies such as languages, sport and media to promote Morgan Stanley presentations at their university. Our ambassadors utilized these connections, as well as links with non-numerical departments such as history, languages, geography and law, as channels for promotion. In addition, our campus ambassadors emailed their peers, used any available online message boards, did lecture shout-outs, contacted their careers services, and distributed posters and fliers.

As a result of our work, Morgan Stanley reported a significant increase in attendance at presentations, and applications from students who were not from a finance or numerical subject background.

Our campus ambassadors have been representing five of the world’s top graduate recruiters at over fifty of the world’s top universities. They’ve promoted presentations and application deadlines, and are raising brand awareness at their universities.

And now we’ve just been commissioned to work on an exciting, new, high-profile project that will take us to Africa, Asia and North and South America in the new year. We’re very much looking forward to meeting  more of our members from across the globe!

We’ve run surveys across Europe, the US and Asia into attitudes towards careers in investment banking for two different major Europe-based international investment banks – both of which confirmed that while the top tier of banks is still dominated by the big three US banks, the chasing pack in the next tier are growing stronger and bringing in some new names.

These studies have seen StudentBoard significantly extend its presence in China and the US, whilst cementing our relationships with students across Europe.

We’ve run a number of UK studies of attitudes towards careers in law and in particular looking at what might be the advantages of working for particular law firms, and the enduring prestige of the so-called Magic Circle.

More recently the firm has used StudentBoard™’s ambassadors to promote its ‘Insights’ – filmed interviews with partners covering key issues in the evolving legal landscape – on both Facebook and YouTube, becoming the first major law firms to proactively engage with these user-defined media.