Professional social networks are a new way to view graduate employment

Data from professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn offer a new way to see graduate employment outcomes, and the results are different.

Professional social networking data shows Macquarie University business graduates getting better employment outcomes than in traditional university rankings. Photo: Tim Pascoe

UNSW, Macquarie University and the Australian National University are among the institutions that top new university performance tables that compare the proportion of business degree graduates who succeed in getting jobs with top employers.

The data, drawn from the information about themselves that graduates post on professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn, shows that 14 per cent of business bachelor graduates at ANU work for top tier employers six months after graduating, compared with 13 per cent at UNSW and 12 per cent at both Macquarie and Western Sydney University.

For business masters graduates UNSW is top with 19 per cent of graduates landing jobs with top tier employers, followed by the University of Western Australia at 14 per cent, Macquarie at 13 per cent and ANU at 11 per cent.

The data, commissioned by the Macquarie Business School, compares the seven universities in or near the Sydney basin as well as other Group of Eight universities.

Macquarie Business School executive dean Eric Knight said the data, sourced from a Revelio Labs dataset and curated by Mandala, gave a different picture to traditional rankings. Some other rankings do not offer information about graduate employment outcomes or use unclear methodology.

Professor Knight said the Mandala graduate employability figures showed Macquarie Business School performing better compared with other universities than in traditional rankings.

Eric Knight

He said, with the emphasis on employability outcomes for students in the Universities Accord, universities needed to use appropriate benchmarks to measure success. The graduate employment data derived from social media “brings great visibility and accountability to the things the sector is asking for and the government is increasingly wanting to measure”, Professor Knight said.

Mandala’s report said the employment outcomes were based on social networking information from 215,000 graduates across the 2014-22 period. Its list of 114 top tier employers is based on several parameters including the size of the employer and level of graduate salaries, culture, innovation and the economic prominence of the employer.

Similar graduate data is collected by the federal government’s Graduate Outcomes Survey, which received responses from 131,000 graduates for its latest report. It collects a broader range of data on educational experience and employment outcomes but does not show detail on which employers graduates find jobs with.