Check out the Oxford Guild featured in The Telegraph on Tuesday 16th July 2013. The full article is copied below:
Student Advice from the Oxford Guild Business Society
Managing the future, the Oxford Guild Business Society Committee Find out how RBS is helping young entrepreneurs at Inspiring Youth Enterprise How to deal with an increasingly competitive graduate market? For several years now graduate recruitment statistics have continued to shock and roles are becoming more and more competitive. This has meant that ever increasing numbers of strong candidates are receiving rejections as companies raise the bar. According to a graduate recruitment survey from UK based High Fliers Research, the UK’s leading employers recruited fewer graduates than expected in 2012 and entry-level vacancies decreased by 0.8% compared with recruitment in 2011. The biggest cuts in vacancies in 2012 were at the accounting & professional services firms and the investment banks – employers in these sectors reduced their graduate intake by more than 1,200 places, compared with their original recruitment targets. Students from top universities across the country at being affected and at Oxford University some of them have decided that enough is enough and that things need to change. The award winning Oxford Guild Business Society, Oxford and the UK’s largest and oldest student careers society, with over 8,000 current members and a six figure budget has made helping students to become stronger applicants a central aim. Incoming President Stratis Limnios had the following to say: ‘whilst work at Oxford can be terribly intense, students need to realise that they have to do more than just a degree in order to compete against the best job applicants from universities around the world. Extra-curricular activities, awareness of global affairs and honing of application and interview technique are critical. Gone are the days when you could waltz into a job solely on the back of a university degree; one needs to be increasingly proactive and the Guild aims to make this as easy as possible for our members.’ The Guild, who won the national RBS ESSA runner up prize for the best series of events in 2012, has been working hard to come up with an innovative and comprehensive series of events and services in order to make ambitious Oxford students as strong candidates as they can possibly be. This involves several approaches: Firstly making as many students as possible aware of the full spectrum of opportunities available to them, secondly connecting them with companies through more exciting events than simply presentations, thirdly training the students and equipping them with the skills they need to secure internships and jobs and finally a more bespoke individual service tailored to the students. The Guild has run over 100 events this year in a wide range of exciting formats including multi-firm speed networking afternoon teas, office trips to London, large scale networking events and interesting speaker events. Vice-President Rebecca Abrey believes that ‘it is key that students start thinking about their careers in the back of their minds very early on as that will put you in good stead. I got involved with the Guild in my first year and found it to be one of the best decisions I have made since coming to Oxford. The large committee is very proactive and welcoming and merit is recognised and rewarded. We work very hard but I am proud to have risen up quickly to now be very senior in this close-knit family and I hope to be able to help other first years to do the same!’ The Guild’s progress in recent years has been meteoric and they aim to continue to grow rapidly but at the same time maintain their high quality. The Society’s job is not only to hold events for our sponsors but also to act on an advisory basis. As students on campus the committee can help recommend the best courses of action for companies to take and knows what works and what does not. Speaking from the Guild’s HQ, Chairman Abbas Kazmi felt that ‘the key point is that we know this better than anyone else in the country due to the depth of experience we have working with a large range of companies and different industries. This gives us the breadth and depth that nobody else has. You need to run the Society like a company as we are such an enormous institution which does so much good work to help our peers. Our thousands of members are our clients, our sponsors and partners are our shareholders, and our events and services are our product offerings. We hope to continue to provide a stellar and highly professional service to both students and sponsors for many years to come’. With many exciting plans ahead we look forward to the Guild’s continued success. Watch this space.