Welcome to our inaugural Talent Insights post! Every week, we’ll be providing employers, professionals in career services and career-seeking candidates with relevant and actionable data-driven insight, covering all things Gen Y, to help you do your job better – whether it’s setting recruiting strategy, helping others or looking for a new career.

With Labor Day behind us and the back-to-school recruiting season officially off and running, we thought we’d take closer look at the general assumption that college students look for and pursue job and internship opportunities most actively in the fall. As we sliced and diced our data on total Experience Network page views over the past year, we found out some pretty interesting things. The most significant observation: though the “fall is crazy busy” assumption did hold true, there was a substantial activity boost in early spring that we must consider as we plan for 2009 and beyond.

Starting with August 2007, and then tracking each and every month through this past July, you can clearly see there was a bump in Experience Network page views in the back-to-school timeframe. Interestingly, the most significant peak was not in the fall – it was in the middle of winter. Looking at the trends, nearly a quarter (24%) of our traffic came in between January and February 2008. This more than doubles the numbers from last December, and it’s a jump up from September-October 2007 (which represented 21% of our annual traffic over this time frame).

It’s pretty clear that following a two month downward trend leading into the holidays and winter break, students returned to campus recharged for the spring and most likely focused on their goals at hand: to either find internships for the summer, land full-time jobs by May and/or use all the industry content and career resources available in the Experience Network to help them find success.

There are probably a host of reasons why the page view ups and downs are what they are. Regardless, we can extrapolate the numbers to consider the bigger question: should employers seeking Gen Y talent recalibrate their efforts to better reach candidates when they’re most actively engaged throughout the year?

On that note, welcome once again and happy fall!

Tags: college recruiting, Gen Y, internship search, job search, page views, Traffic Stats

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Traffic Stats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.