Team Prosple
Prosple New Zealand has developed a new methodology to determine the Top 100 Graduate Employers in 2023, which gives equal weight to both popularity and program quality.
Top 100 Graduate Employers
Top 100 Graduate Employers
It's been eight years since we started ranking Australia’s Top 100 Graduate Employers. We’ve continually improved our methodology, and this year's ranking is the best yet.
Let's take a closer look at how we created it – including which employers we considered, how we ranked them, and what makes our list different from others of its kind.
Who We Consider
Who We Consider
We began by considering all employers on our various sites. Besides Prosple New Zealand, we also set up graduate recruitment sites for universities around the country, totaling to 300+ sites.
Since all graduate employers are welcome to join these sites, we started out with a list of thousands of employers. We then filtered out any employers who had no page views, applications, or reviews. This left us with a list of 3500 companies.
Note that we consider all graduate employers – whether they are free or paying members of our site. This makes our data more comprehensive than other rankings of its kind, which may only account for results from their paying clients.
How We Rank Employers
How We Rank Employers
Now that we had a list of eligible employers, we needed to figure out how attractive each one would be to students on the hunt for a job.
So we evaluated them on two criteria: student popularity and program quality. We’ll get into what these mean later, but for now just know that each of these criteria was weighted equally.
Our list is the only one of its kind (that we know of at least!) that factors in both criteria. We believe this gives employers a more comprehensive view of how their graduate programs are doing while allowing students to better gauge who the top employers really are.
How We Gauge Student Popularity
How We Gauge Student Popularity
Student popularity is a measure of how popular and reputable an employer is among students. We assessed this based on two factors: page views and applications.
“Page views” refers to the number of times the employer’s profile was viewed by someone visiting our sites. For reference, we get around 8 million visitors every year to all our sites.
“Applications” refers to the number of applications that students started on our sites. (They usually need to finish the applications on the employer’s site.) More than 1.3 million applications are started on our sites each year, so that gives us a good sample size as well.
How We Gauge Program Quality
How We Gauge Program Quality
Program quality is a measure of what it’s actually like to work at the company. We assessed this using real employee reviews. Every year, we create a survey and invite all graduate employers on our site to send the survey to their graduate employees and student interns.
On the survey, we ask respondents to rate their employers on 12 factors, including overall satisfaction. We use the employer’s average overall satisfaction rating as their quality score.
To balance out variation in the number or age of reviews:
We taxed employers whose most recent review is more than two years old.
We taxed employers with four reviews or less, and especially those without a single grad review.
Finally, we combined our findings on popularity and quality to put together our ranking list, and feature the highest-ranked 100 employers!
Why We Do What We Do
Why We Do What We Do
As you can see, we put a lot of thought into making our ranking system fair and reliable.
That’s because we remember what it was like going through the recruitment process ourselves – and how difficult it was to make any informed decisions due to the sheer lack of data.
With more reliable data, employers can also better evaluate the success of their graduate programs and identify areas for improvement – helping them craft even better experiences for students like yourself. It’s a virtuous cycle!
So if you haven’t already, check out our list of New Zealand’s Top 100 Graduate Employers. And if you’re an employer looking to elevate your graduate program, we can help with that too – Contact us here.
