The practice of graduate recruitment involves recruiting those who have recently graduated from a college or university in the profession that the recruiters are looking for. Research has shown that recent graduates benefit from this program substantially, and with ease, as most are done in the college or universities career counseling service.

The problem in the recruitment field is using the phrase graduate, because it may give associates a distorted idea of the candidate who applied for the job, because the use of this word may be considered particularly redundant for those who have attended universities. Graduates stand as great a chance of being unemployed as those who are not graduates but are in the same type of field.

In many careers the use of graduate recruitment is regarded as a stepping stone to moving up staff on the ladder of success. Most of the employers also have the belief that they will be able to find staff members with the right amount of skills when using graduate recruitment. Some industries such as engineering use graduate recruitment as a way to be sure that the staff personnel have all of the correct qualifications for the position. This means that graduates will be one step ahead of non graduates especially when it comes down to advancing in their career.

Sometimes companies with vacancies may use the term of graduate recruitment but will settle for non graduates if they are skilled in the position and possesses more hands on experience than the recent graduate. However, being a graduate of a college or university usually means that the applicant is more intelligent and has other skills that could be used by the company.

Some graduates may use social networks such as MySpace to find work, but will quickly learn that the profiles they have don't showcase their skills. Employers are quickly recognizing that the use of these sites may be beneficial to graduate recruitment, while others will find something wrong with this method of graduate recruitment.

When the term of graduate recruitment is used, it usually describes that a person has learned the skills they need for the position in the course of their education; some find that sometimes this is not always true. Some say that unless they work in the market that specializes in their chosen degree, then they will rarely use the skills learned in the university. What they find most often is that they use skills the skills that were part of their course of study like presentation preparation and public speaking which may be very useful, even more so than what they went to university for.