Business graduating to greater things

THE Yorkshire social enterprise which matches employers with the best graduates, is looking to expand further after winning a contract to work with universities in East Anglia.

Graduates Yorkshire, which became a standalone business two-and-a-half-years ago after originally being set up with public money, relaunched the graduate recruitment service, GradsEast.co.uk, and is now running it for the Association of the Universities of East of England (AUEE).

The deal will see the company double the size of its patch, working with higher-education institutions across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, including the University of Cambridge. It also expects to increase its turnover from the 500,000 it reached in 2009.

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Martin Edmondson, chief executive of Graduates Yorkshire, said: "The core values and principles are very similar to ours in Yorkshire – namely matching graduates and employers, and ensuring

that the region is aware of the economic value of graduates, both on an individual business level and a macro-economic level."

The public spending crisis could see the organisation expand more, as the other UK regions' graduate services could also become standalone operations, creating the chance to pitch for business.

Graduates Yorkshire was set up in 1996 with funding from Yorkshire Forward.

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Mr Edmondson said: "It will be a business opportunity. We have done the hard years of making this kind of thing work and we have made some mistakes along the way.

"Because we have done that we can offer some quite useful insight into the programmes. It is going to be a growing area. We have got some interesting ideas."

The recession meant that Graduates Yorkshire brought forward by three to five years its plans to diversify, Mr Edmondson added. The firm, which in 2008 won the University spin-out category in the Yorkshire Post Excellence in Business Awards, took on more consultancy work as well as providing market intelligence and helping to design graduate schemes for businesses.

"The contract win is also validation of our strategy during recession. The recession forced us to work harder, work smarter and to diversify our offer.

"While all of these developments are very encouraging

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and show we are doing something right, we are conscious that there is still a lot of work to do within Yorkshire and Humber convincing more and more employers of the value of recruiting graduates – so we won't be forgetting that key part of our mission."

Mike Hall, deputy director of the AUEE, which includes Cambridge University and which put out the tender, said: "Graduates Yorkshire will help us retain the best graduates in the area by working closely with businesses and promoting the region.

"It is not just major companies that benefit, but small and medium-sized enterprises which are also searching for this talent to give them a competitive edge. The graduate market in the east of England is particularly fertile and offers a wealth of opportunities to employers."

Graduates Yorkshire was praised for offering the best growth strategy for GradsEast, which will have to be self-sufficient when its funding runs out in the summer.

Vital link

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Graduates Yorkshire is built upon the success of the original Graduate Link project.

Established in 1996, Graduate Link provided a recruitment service to meet the growing demand for graduates in small and medium sized businesses and its services later expanded to help employers of any size. Its activities are still going today under Graduates Yorkshire.

Yorkshire Forward previously funded Graduates Yorkshire, which is jointly owned by the region's 10 universities and offers recruitment-based services to help graduates and employers find each other.

It emerged as a social enterprise after a warning that the region's economic development was being threatened by its failure to retain more graduate talent.

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