Wed, 28 Jun 2012

Employers should look beyond the top graduates from the UK’s leading universities, universities and science minister David Willetts said yesterday (26 June).

According to a report in The Daily Telegraph, Willetts warned that employers were “fishing in an unduly narrow pool” of talent and that staff shouldn’t be hired on the basis of “incredibly crude” traditional degree classifications.

He continued that some employers complain they cannot find the graduates they’re looking for and how incredibly difficult it is to track them down. “You talk to them and discover they're looking at about six universities. That is to miss out on a large amount of graduate talent.”

Willetts was introducing the government’s formal response to a review carried out by Professor Sir Tim Wilson, former vice-chancellor of Hertfordshire University, into the links between higher education and business, in London yesterday.