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Two years after the banking crisis, with a new government pledging to "rebalance the economy", to which recruiters should this summer's graduates be posting their job applications?

Engineering? Science? No, it's banking, finance and accountancy. If they want big salaries, it's investment banking.

And of course, they've got to go to London and south-east England, which together have more than half of graduate vacancies, at least from the bigger companies.

The average UK starting salary for a graduate is stuck for the third year at £25,000.

In London, it's £28,000 and for most of the rest of the UK, including Scotland, it's £23,000.

Anecdotally, that's a lot more than some are having to settle for.

Scattergun applications

The figure comes from the most recent survey from the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), showing how tough going it is for those now leaving university.

Vacancies are down 7%, after a 9% fall last year.

The 200 larger recruiters that contributed to its research say they're more likely to look for 2:1 degrees, and there's a sharp increase in the numbers expecting relevant work experience.

A growing number, up to 7% of them, are only bothering to look for graduates from certain universities.

And a trial is under way to look beyond the blunt instrument of the traditional degree classifications.

Eighteen universities are trying out a Higher Education Achievement Report, which will include course marks, extra-curricular activities and employability skills.

It's a hirers' market.

Many recruiters say the quality of application has gone up, but they are also under pressure from the sheer weight of numbers.

Graduates are firing off applications in huge numbers, and sometimes in a scattergun approach, meaning the 69 applications for every job - more than double the number two years ago - may not be as bad as it looks.

Across 200 companies with 18,000 vacancies this year, they report nearly 700,000 applications.

A tenth of the recruiters surveyed say they've received more than 10,000 applications each.

Pulling pints and shelf-stacking

The numbers are swelled by those who graduated last year.

A recently-published survey by university career advisers found around 20,000 (about a tenth) are unemployed, and 50,000 more are under-employed - not using the skills they've gained, often in pubs and restaurants, unskilled retail jobs or the grimmer end of the call centre business.

The straits in which graduates find themselves is clear from speaking to smaller businesses.

One pub in Glasgow's west end says almost every second person coming through the door during the day is asking if there are jobs on offer.

The AGR research shows how some sectors are doing better than others.

Investment bank jobs, which are coming close to filling half the gap created when they shed staff two years ago, are paying a median £35,000.

A legal job will pay slightly more. But the law is one of the toughest areas for finding a job at all.

It is telling that the spectrum of starting salaries puts engineering and industry close to the bottom, at £23,000, with that sector reporting a decline of one fifth in the number of jobs available.

That tells you much of what you need to know about the challenge of economic rebalancing.

It's not what I'm hearing from Aberdeen, however, where the offshore sector is keen to recruit young engineers.

It's also worth noting one response from a company in the fast-moving consumer goods sector - with the sharpest vacancies fall of any - that it has shifted its recruitment to non-graduates, as it has found graduates "may not be the best fit for the company".

It reports they lack the employability skills for the roles previously offered to them.

Skill shortages

It's also worth noting that IT is seen as a sector with weak recruitment, when it's also seen as the sector that will see skill shortages before too long.

The short-term market message is very different to the long-term interests of the economy.

Capita Learning & Development has responded to the AGR figures with a warning about that skills gap.

Although you might say it has a vested interest in doing so, it says 70% of business leaders fear that inadequate staff skills are the greatest threat to their ability to capitalise on the recovery: "More than half admit their under-trained workforces is struggling to cope with expanded job remits following waves of jobs cuts during the recession".

The public sector has been a place graduates can go to take up the slack when private sector jobs decline.

The survey found an increase of 5% in guideline pay for the public sector, reflecting national pay rates more than the state of the market.

However, that was before a Whitehall pay freeze was imposed on salaries over £21,000.

More significant is that the public sector respondents expected the number of vacancies to drop by nearly 10%, and that too was before the depth of the government's cuts became clear.

That reduction is expected to hit hardest in the areas outside the south-east of England, in which public sector recruitment has been particularly important in this graduate market.