How long will it take to find your first graduate job?
According to our June poll, 18% of respondents suggested they would find a graduate role within one month. I like your attitude, to use an old cliché, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. However, of the 45% of you who think it will take six months or more, at Step we have…
The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers – and our version (don’t forget the SMEs!)
The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers list for 2015 released recently and it’s been making the rounds on social media. There’s a lot of big name employers on there that will stand out of course; Google, BBC, John Lewis, HSBC, Apple etc. All attractive companies that I’m sure are a pleasure to work with. For…
6 reasons you could have been rejected

You’ve just spent hours upon hours applying for graduate jobs around the country and have lost count of how many times you have resaved your CV and cover letter. If that rejection email comes through, it leaves you feeling disappointed but mostly disheartened. Don’t wrack your brain for hours on end causing endless worry and…
Honesty is the best policy!
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I ask why someone is interested in a role, and they respond “I have always wanted to work in that” This really gets my goat! Why? Let’s take a recent example of this where someone had a first degree in a completely unrelated subject to their masters…
10 Steps towards stress-free (ish) exams
I know personally that exams can be a really hard and stressful time of the year at university, but if you think about what you’re doing, prepare and look after yourself during this time, you’ll feel a lot better about it. These are just a few tips that I picked up over my three years…
Reflections on our Spring Campus tour – Careers Fair FAQ
We are coming to the end of our spring campus tour and boy have we been busy. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve travelled up and down the country visiting the likes of the universities of Birmingham, Lancaster, Loughborough, Manchester and Man Met (both in one day which tested my capacity to be in…
Preparing for a Skype interview

At Step we use Skype a lot, whether it’s for an interview, a way of meeting the candidates, or to do your pre-start checks (passport check, payment schedule etc). It is still extremely important to be professional when using Skype, so we’ve listed a few tips to help. Is your Skype ID professional and appropriate? Remember…
The keys to graduate success…
‘My degree is next to worthless’… Well at Step we tend not to agree. This BBC article reports on the fact that it is not always possible to find a job directly related to your course of study, resulting in a feeling by some forlorn graduates of it all having been a waste of time.…
Planning for the difficult questions – making use of your experience

Interviews are an art form in themselves and as we enter the time of year when graduates are entering the job market, it’s important to maximise every opportunity you have. Here are some tips on competency based interviews based on feedback from our own experiences as account managers here at Step. Many competency based questions…
“It’s just me, the dog, and the kettle…” – Why we work with SMEs and you can too
Best quote from a business development call EVER, I think! The person I spoke to couldn’t believe that I was calling to offer him a way to access graduate talent, because he wasn’t from a massive conglomerate or big-brand company. “Surely there is no way a new graduate would be interested in working for…