Matthew Staley says he would not “entertain the idea” of making graduate recruitment for the IT consulting company Fujitsu an in-house operation again. The sums simply wouldn’t add up. The sheer volume of applications — Fujitsu received about 3,000 last year for 100 vacancies on its graduate development programme — would mean he would need to recruit a large and costly team of workers to process them.

With the task of sifting and testing graduate applicants handed over five years ago to specialists Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS), Staley can now enjoy “more of a High Church” relationship with candidates, as AMS’s Clodagh Brannigan describes it, and focus on his wider role as head of overall recruitment for the company.

“To handle 3,000 graduate applications professionally in-house, you would need to recruit a big team,” says Staley. “Also, there are peaks and troughs in the recruitment calendar. We would have to employ hundreds of people to manage the peaks if we took it in-house and that would be difficult to justify economically.”

Outsourcing graduate recruitment is becoming a trend among companies of a certain size. “When I go to graduate recruitment conferences I am surprised at how many are still in-house: but they tend to be huge volume recruiters, we are mid,” says Staley.

Brannigan, emerging talent director for AMS, manages graduate recruitment for 12 companies, using a core team of 45 staff in the UK with extra casuals hired at peak times. Her clients include several investment banks and a defence contractor: “This year we will handle 75,000 applications and place 2,000 graduates.”

The outsourcing trend was born in the downturn of the late 1990s, she says. “Before then many companies still had big graduate recruitment teams in-house. But when the lean times came, companies closed them down because they weren’t hiring graduates.” In 1993, when the economy began climbing, the companies “started up graduate recruitment once again but they didn’t have the staff to handle the operation”.

Now graduates such as Erfaan Ayub, 26, who was hired on Fujitsu’s 18-month graduate programme three years ago on a salary in the low £20,000s, are handled by recruitment specialists — from the moment they click on the careers button on Fujitsu’s website and whizz off their CV, right up to the final interview and tests at the company’s assessment centres.

Unlike many applicants who sail through the recruitment cycle without realising that their recruitment has been outsourced, Ayub, who has a degree in computer science, realised straight away. “I was aware I was being handled by AMS. Clodagh introduced herself,” he explains. Nonetheless, he didn’t experience the detachment from the company that graduates recruited via middlemen sometimes complain of.

“It was a slick process. Clodagh was able to answer all the questions I had about Fujitsu,” says Ayub, who since landing the job has been promoted several times and is now, as a Fujitsu business consultant, earning more than double his initial salary. “I can see if it was not so well integrated an operation, how people might feel a little distanced from the company they have actually applied to work for.”

Benefits, Ayub feels, include the fact that had he been unsuccessful, his CV would have been held on its database by AMS and might have been sent off to another firm, improving his chances of securing another post.

He was also impressed at the efficiency of the hiring process, from the first stage of sending off his CV rather than having to fill in detailed application forms to, five months later, being told he had got the job. AMS uses software that formats any CV into a company’s application form: “All I had to do was send my CV through, which was straightforward compared with graduate schemes where there are lots of long questions,” says Ayub.

A fortnight later came numeracy and reasoning tests, followed by a half-day being interviewed and taking part in role plays in an assessment centre in Stevenage. The final stage was a spell at another assessment centre in Manchester. “Within two days, I was told I was successful and that they would like to take me onto their graduate stream.”

It was a very different experience to his “negative” time with an in-house recruiter. “I was supposed to be having an interview with a member of staff and ended up waiting around the company’s offices. After a couple of hours I was told: ‘Sorry, he has called in sick’.”

Last month a survey showed that many British businesses were making a bad first impression on job seekers. The T-Mobile study of more than 2,000 people found that 56% of people who came away from a job interview with a bad impression of the company blamed it on the interviewer, citing rudeness, lateness, sexism and even drunkenness.

Many companies feel that employing recruitment specialists can help them avoid such difficulties — and the concern is particularly acute for those hiring graduates, with their ready access to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where many are only too eager to recount the horrors of their job-seeking adventures. For Staley, particularly important is the commitment to feeding back to unsuccessful graduates why they weren’t selected.

“We are talking huge volumes to process and keep happy,” he says. “It only takes a couple of those people to get onto Facebook and start complaining about Fujitsu for a lot of damage to be done.”

No downsides? “Because we have been working with AMS a long time, they know our business very well,” says Staley. “I can trust them to put our message across to the marketplace. That has taken time. If we were to stop using AMS, I am not convinced we would find another company that could do that quickly. If other companies are contemplating this, they need to look at it as a long-term option rather than a quick fix. It may be difficult to get the quality of service right from a standing start.”

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