The Job Seeking Experiences of International Graduates in the Host Country: Australia’s Lost Opportunity?

This paper examines the job seeking experiences of international graduates in attempting to obtain meaningful work in their university education host country. Qualitative feedback on the specific job seeking barriers and experiences in the host country after graduating were provided by 696 respondents. The findings suggest that the specific barriers to finding employment were their visa status, lack of work experience and perceived discriminatory practices of potential employers and/or their agents. The study also suggests that the discriminatory employment experiences of international university graduates demonstrate a lack of congruence between the concept of best fit in hiring decision making and a culturally diverse Australian labour market. Not only do the current practices limit the source of potential highly educated, skilled and culturally aware employees into the labour market of the host country, it also severely compromises an organisation’s ability to achieve workplace diversity; a strategic outcome necessary to compete within a highly competitive global economy

Clustering Using Improved Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Cuckoo search (CS) is one of the new swarm intelligence optimization algorithms inspired by the obligate brood parasitic behavior of cuckoo, which used the idea of L??vy flights. But the convergence and stability of the algorithm is not ideal due to the heavy-tail property of L??vy flights. Therefore an improved cuckoo search (ICS) algorithm for clustering is proposed, in which the movement and randomization of the cuckoo is modified. The simulation results of ICS clustering method on UCI benchmark data sets compared with other different clustering algorithms show that the new algorithm is feasible and efficient in data clustering, and the stability and convergence speed both get improved obviously. ? Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.EI0479-488879