How Can Universities Support Local Employers to Make Use of the Graduate Visa? Insights from the University of York
With thanks to Quinn Whitmore, our intern
The University of York decided to test the results of a recent HEPI report on the graduate visa and replicate the survey on our local business population. The results were encouraging and will shape our next steps in business engagement.
“Not heard of this”
Everyone who is anyone working in the field of international employability has read the HEPI report, ‘Not heard of this’: Employers’ perceptions of the UK’s Graduate Route visa. Published in January 2023, it (now famously) reported that only 3% of surveyed businesses had knowingly hired someone on a graduate visa, and 27% had not heard of the option at all.
Although there were also some positive statistics, such as that 42% of businesses were open to using the option in the future (more than were open to sponsoring someone), the data put paid to the hope that the Graduate visa had already meaningfully increased the number of opportunities available to international graduates in the UK.
There are a few immediately apparent reasons for this low engagement: the visa was still quite new, and there had been no government campaign to promote the option. But the result was nevertheless concerning, and raised some serious questions for Higher Education professionals: Why else was engagement so low? What could we do about it? How can we engage businesses in this work?
The Context: International Student Employability in the UK
The report’s findings were bad news all round: for graduates, universities, and businesses. International students who come to study in the UK have made enormous financial and personal investments to study here. They have left behind their homes, families and friends, facing culture shock and homesickness, along with the rigours of an academic degree. Without access to the same loans as home students, many of them rely on their families and communities to afford extremely high international tuition fees and living costs. Finding well paid work soon after graduation is often an absolute imperative.
Whilst many students return home to work after their degrees, some international students are keen to remain in the UK and work, at least for the short term. This is great news for the UK. For anyone, moving to the other side of the world demands resilience, the ability to think on your feet, flexibility, problem solving skills, and many more attributes: the list is essentially an employer’s wish list of soft skills. On top of this, international graduates bring valuable cultural knowledge and language skills into UK businesses who operate, or are interested in operating, internationally.
There are many Universities across the country already doing brilliant work to enable businesses to hire their international graduates, but it is hard to drown out the government’s silence on the graduate visa, and now the announced review of the graduate route. The small businesses who do not have a licence to sponsor, and could therefore benefit from this option, often lack the legal and HR departments to advise them in navigating this new route, and universities cannot fill that gap. Whilst there is a student/graduate facing Graduate visa webpage on the government website, there isn’t anything for businesses looking for information on the nuts and bolts of the graduate visa, or any meaningful promotion of the option itself.
Our Response at the University of York
This project began as an effort to promote the graduate visa to our local business community, but after a well-timed meeting with the Employer Engagement team, we realised this would be jumping the gun. I also heard from colleagues across the country who had tried to put on information sessions about the Graduate visa for local businesses but had very low engagement and attendance. Whilst we trusted the HEPI report completely, we didn’t feel we could sink time and resources into promoting the graduate route without testing whether the results reflected our local business community. The business survey and interviews we conducted came from the realisation that we needed to find out what our businesses already thought and knew before we could begin to think about promotion.
We began by hiring an international student as an intern to manage the project and compiling a list of York-based businesses with strong connections to the university. We then created a brief online survey to gauge business owners’ understanding of and interest in the graduate visa, and hiring international graduates in general, before asking if they’d be willing to take part in an interview to discuss their responses in more detail.
Mindful of how busy business owners are, we designed the survey to be extremely quick to fill out. Besides the name of the contact and business, the survey asked just four questions to establish how familiar the business was with the graduate visa, and their understanding of the benefits of hiring an international graduate:
● Have you ever hired an international graduate on a graduate visa?
● Rate your familiarity with graduate visas on a scale from 1 to 5
● How would you rate your openness to the prospect of hiring international graduates through the graduate visa route on a scale from 1 to 5?
● On what basis might your business consider recruiting an international graduate?
If they indicated they were happy to talk further, our intern got in touch to arrange an interview to ask them more about the rationale behind the answers: if they didn’t want to hire an international student, why was that? If they did, what support would they like? Whilst the survey gave us a good temperature test of the whole area, we were especially interested in finding out the ‘why’.
The Results
Due to the results of the original HEPI survey, I was apprehensive about the findings of this project and was therefore very pleasantly surprised by what our intern found. Similar to the HEPI survey, the majority of our respondents rated their understanding of the Graduate Visa as zero, but a much larger minority (33%) had actually hired someone through the graduate route. On a scale of one to five (one being ‘Not open to the prospect’ and five being ‘Very open to the prospect’), over 80% of respondents rated their openness to hiring international graduates at least three out of five.
When asked under what circumstances the employer would consider hiring an international graduate:
● 40% selected ‘to address a specific technical skills need’;
● 7% selected ‘To bring particular language skills into the business’;
● 33% selected ‘As part of general recruitment’;
● 7% selected ‘Any of the above three’;
● and only 13% reported they were unlikely to engage with any option that required visas.
In the additional comments section, a number of businesses expressed they were not open to recruiting international graduates because they weren’t currently looking to recruit anyone.
The results from the interviews were also very positive and gave further insight. One business said they would be very happy to hire an international graduate ‘if the university put them in touch’. A business who had hired someone through the graduate route reported it was a useful way to see if someone fit the business before investing in a licence to sponsor.
Our next steps
The results of the survey were so positive they demanded some kind of action, and we are currently considering our options. Whilst an event to promote the Graduate visa option is still on the table, we are also considering how we can work more strategically with businesses who specifically work within skills gaps to recruit our international graduates into those roles. I look forward to sharing more about this in the future.
In the short term, an unexpected secondary benefit of the survey was that it provided us with a list of local employers who had engaged with the Graduate Visa option. Later, when I was working with another business who wanted to hire an international graduate of ours, I was able to put them in touch with a business from that list to share information about their experience, which was absolutely invaluable. If nothing else, I would encourage other universities to conduct their own surveys for that reason alone.
