L’Oreal and MBDA design innovative graduate and apprenticeship schemes to secure future talent
Apprentices and graduates are increasingly showing loyalty to their career but not companies, delegates heard at the CIPD annual conference. But employers shouldn’t see this as an excuse for organisations to “get lazy” with their talent programmes, Negin Cooper, graduate recruitment and development manager at L’Oreal UK&I said.
“We’ve seen a complete shift in graduate behaviour over the last 12 months. Young people are really considering their options, and so we have to make our schemes worth their time,” Cooper explained.
She said that L’Oreal is relying on new blood in the labour market to “challenge the status quo”.
“Our goal by 2020 is to gain another one billion customers so we have to have a representative workforce to meet that,” Cooper said. “Graduates are at the forefront of their audience, why shouldn’t we been using that as competitive advantage?”
But for Aileen Randhawa, HR director at UK missiles manufacturer, MBDA, a persistent and significant skills shortage has meant the organisation has had to take on apprentices every year for 20 years.
“The average age of an MBDA employee is 45 years and the average tenure is 27 years,” Randhawa explained. “Three-quarters of our workforce is retiring in the next 15 years, so we have to invest in knowledge transfer and ongoing training, and we have to up our apprentice intake every year.”
The apprenticeship scheme at MBDA is four years long, which is lengthier than some of the equivalent schemes on the market Randhawa admitted. But she said it includes an extensive training package and full employment from day one.
“The skills our staffers need, take time and effort to develop, so it is crucial that we are investing and developing for the long term,” she said. “But all our apprentices are employed from day one, and are on a salaried structure. They have to meet standards to progress. That is why motivation and formal recognition is vital.”
For the more passive recruits, Cooper and her team had to find innovative ways to attract them: “We hold L’Oreal ‘lock-ins’ where organisation representatives go to a university and host a session on skills, which we then turn into an assessment centre to test students on their potential to work at the global company,” she said.
However, research from the CEB suggests that one in four young people leave a company after the end of a scheme, so is the time and effort invested in attracting young talent worth it for employers?
Cooper said: “Forming partnerships have been vital in helping us to spot talent.
“We worked with Rolls Royce on a gender diversity piece, but it also highlighted the similar skills challenges we both face.
“We’re both very different organisations but actually we’re both looking for engineering talent and L’Oreal is often last place prospective engineers look to, while Rolls Royce is not the first port-of-call for young females,” she added.
Randhawa said: “The recruitment of young talent allows us to address some of the diversity gaps we have at MBDA. We partner with education providers who can only provide equal numbers of male and female prospective candidates,” she said.