The Daily Campus

Issue date: 5/6/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Ryan Sayers Businesses are searching for newly-graduated employees to fill now-open jobs.

Some students are scrambling for the summer to secure interviews for internships, sifting through pages of entry-level positions on careerbuilder.com and calling back cards from last-minute career fairs, while others are weighing their options on which job offers to take.

"This is shaping up to be a great year for college recruiting," said Brian Krueger, president of collegegrad.com.

A recent survey conducted by Krueger's company of his clients found that 55 percent of their entry level employers, which include the likes of Walgreens, Lockheed-Martin and even the Peace Corps, plan to hire more college graduates this year than last year.

"The hiring increase that we're seeing is consistent throughout the nation and across all majors," Krueger said.

His optimism is justified. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a guild for career councilors at universities across the United States, showed businesses in general plan to hire 17.4 percent more new college grads than last year. This is much better than previous years where college grads were overlooked in favor of unemployed professionals or recent grads that already have a few years of experience.

"As far as the forecast, this is the best job market for new graduates since 2001, said Andrea Koncz, the employment information officer for NACE. "At that time employers predicted a 23.4 percent increase, but then the economy went south, and employers planned decreases to college hiring in 2002 and 2003. Since then, the increases have been getting larger and larger, and this year in our original Job Outlook 2007 survey, employers planned to increase hiring."

Employers plan to hire more new grads than they did last year, and NACE rated the job market for new college graduates as "very good."  In last year's survey, The Job Outlook 2006 survey, they rated the job market as "good."

Though the market is far from stagnant, it is more specialized and this can confuse some seniors who have only been given a general idea of their options. There are many different choices for many different majors. Often, students don't know where to look and are spooked by the prospect of doing research and discovering jobs on their own.

Continued...

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