According to a recent survey from CareerBuilder, the percentage of US employers that intend to employ college graduates is at a 10 year high. Seventy four percent of employers say they plan to hire recent college graduates this year, which is up from 67 percent last year. Half of those employers plan to offer recent college graduates higher pay than last year and 39 percent of employers hiring recent college graduates will pay a starting salary of $50,000 or more - this compares to 27 percent last year.

Roberto Angelo, CEO and co-founder of AfterCollege, a student and graduate career network based in San Francisco stated, "I'm hearing employers saying that they're not finding the right people so they are turning to new graduates. You can either poach workers-which is hard-or you can go out and recruit them on campus." He added, "Traditionally, large companies have done a really good job of campus recruiting. I'm hearing that small ones are doing better than in the past."

Heidi Soltis-Berner, evolving workforce talent leader and managing director of Deloitte University for consulting firm Deloitte in Westlake, Texas states, "They're bringing new thinking, new ideas and new ways to innovate." She also remarked that, "We're continuing to look at how and when we visit campuses," and added that she has witnessed that the norm for employers is to approach students "earlier and earlier."

Initial indications are that the classes graduating in 2017 comprise the leading edge of Generation Z, who could possibly differ from the Millennials inasmuch as they would be prepared to remain with a new employer for a decade or more and in addition to receiving a sturdy education, many students have demonstrated - by entering internships and co-op programs - that they have work-ready skills.
The Career Builder survey reports that the IT and customer service functions are those that employers most want to staff with new graduates. Top of the list of functions for which employers are looking to recruit recent college graduates are Information technology (33 percent) and customer service jobs (24 percent). Also, there are opportunities in business development (23 percent), finance and accounting (20 percent) and production (18 percent).

According to a previous college graduate employment study by Accenture, four out of five graduates said they considered the availability of jobs in their field of study before deciding on their major and that pragmatism appeared to have paid off.