What key elements can help graduates avoid being rejected within the first phase of recruiting?

Abstract

This study does not focus on the interview phase of an external recruiting process but on the phase prior to this, in which companies analyze the profiles, resumes and cover letters of people who have applied for a particular job or that the department itself has found through social networks such as linkedin. Thus, this study will not take into account subjective factors related to the personality of each person, which can be shown once passed the first filter and the tests of each company. I have decided to analyze this part of the process because it is an issue that we do not usually consider when we apply to a company and in the cases that our application is rejected or we simply do not get a response after sending our CV, we tend to accept and assume the situation without even asking ourselves what we may be doing wrong or what we can improve or even correct. There are factors that allow a person to enter a recruiting process more easily or before another person who does not possess certain characteristics. Some of them are more or less obvious or fair, but the aim of this study is not to judge morality, but to find out which of them have the greatest influence. The sample studied for this thesis are young Spaniards who have just graduated (only those studying business will be taken into account) and are looking for a job in Spain. Among the factors to be studied are gender, age, internships in companies (or professional experience), volunteer work, contacts, etc. To do so, I have constructed an econometric model where the independent variable to be studied is the ease of being hired after graduation. Since this independent variable "EASE" is abstract, in order to measure it, two specific variables have been typified; the number of weeks and the number of failed attempts until being hired. In order to reach a conclusion transposable to the population, a sample of 165 Spanish nationals was used (which cannot be considered as a representative sample of a country, and a multiple regression model was used, which is framed in two books that study this topic, in addition to the popular convictions, and brings a new discovery that I found in newspapers and academic articles: the most significant variables with respect to the ease of finding a job are being male, the average degree, the number of volunteer work and the number of languages.