Graduate employers 'will lose talent with closed doors'

Graduate employers in the human resources (HR) industry will risk being abandoned by a generation of future workers if they close recruitment schemes.

That is the opinion of Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, who said that directors will be kicking themselves when the upturn comes and they have a lack of new staff.

Mr Gilleard told Personnel Today that an HR degree will have taught graduate job hunters a wide array of skills which can be applied in a number of sectors and they will go elsewhere if they need to.

Sonja Stockton, head of graduate recruitment at PricewaterhouseCoopers, concurred: "My advice would be if you can't get a dedicated HR job, see where you can gain real commercial, business experience, which eventually can only add value to your skillset within HR."

An HR graduate scheme is to be set up by the financial services firm in summer of next year, it recently revealed.