Our History

Yorkshire Graduates is an online graduate recruitment service built upon the success of the original Graduate Link project. Established in 1996, Graduate Link provided a recruitment service to meet the growing demand for graduates in SMEs and, with its growing success, its services later expanded to help employers of any size. Graduate Link's activities are still going strong having gone through a number of incarnations since 1996, and now reside at yorkshiregraduates.co.uk

1996

Graduate Link was established as a service for SMEs by the Yorkshire & Humber Higher Education Careers Advisory Services funded by a grant from the Department for Education & Employment. Graduate Link handled its first vacancy.

1998

Graduate Link received funding from the European Social Fund (ESF) enabling the continuation of the project and the development of additional services for SMEs.

2002

Graduate Link came together with other regional projects to form the Graduates Yorkshire initiative funded by Yorkshire Forward. Funding allowed development of services including careers guidance, career coaching, enterprise activity, job sector data and LMI studies. Graduate Link's recruitment services were extended to include large and public sector organisations.

2005

Graduate Link launched its Jobs-by-Email service and handled its 10,000th vacancy.

2007

All Graduate Link services were rebranded under Graduates Yorkshire and a new website was launched offering additional services to both graduates and employers.

2008

Graduates Yorkshire handled its 25,000th vacancy in March and moved from being a funded project to become a social enterprise. In May, a more user-friendly version of the website was launched.

2010

Graduates Yorkshire named the ‘Best Regional Job Board in the UK’ at the National Online Recruitment Awards NORAs

2012

Graduates Yorkshire registers its 50,000th graduate on the site, and places its 20,000th graduate into work since 2007

2013

Graduates Yorkshire becomes part of Gradcore Ltd and is rebadged as Yorkshire Graduates