Forget the milk round. How are employers winning the battle for bright young things?
Things used to be straightforward for school-leavers. A century ago, if you didn’t go to Eton, your options on ending what formal education you had was simple: the pit or the mill. And you were (probably) grateful. Today, the array of choice could scarcely be more befuddling.
In the last two months, the Institute of Public Policy Research has claimed students are better off training for a trade than going to university, yet ONS data says those with a degree are more likely to be employed. ‘Graduates are in demand!’ Income Data Services (IDS) cried at the start of June, but almost 90 per cent of companies still have unfilled vacancies for this year, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR).
And if all this research wasn’t enough, the university system itself is undergoing a colossal shake-up in the wake of the increase in tuition fees in 2012, while a consultation over the scrapping of the current UCAS tariff system – the results of which are likely to come to fruition from July – is set to change how employers sift through the talent pool.
But young people remain undeterred, and graduates are growing ever-more demanding of employers as they seek out not just a job, but a life-long career plan. “Young people are forking out £9,000 a year for their education and expect a much better return on investment,” says Rob Fryer, head of graduate recruitment at Deloitte. “Whether that’s the best tuition, the best experience of university while they are there or reassurance that they can use their skills afterwards and have the career they are hoping for.”
UCAS figures certainly suggest students are still on board, with the number of people applying to university this year the second highest on record. What do employers considering tapping into the graduate market need to know?
1 Get them early
For Ashley Hever, European talent acquisition manager at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, recent changes haven’t made a significant difference to the number of people applying to the company’s graduate management trainee scheme – this year, 700 degree-holders joined the car rental firm – but there is evidence that young people are thinking about their careers much earlier. High Fliers Research claims this year’s undergraduates have applied for 7.5 roles on average before they even leave university, the highest number on record.
“We’re now having to get the brand across pre-university, and make a concerted effort to reach students in the first year of study,” says Hever. “For us, it’s about offering internships and work placements to school-leavers and promoting our graduate schemes and other career opportunities much earlier.”
The 12-month structured training scheme at Enterprise provides the company with a consistent pipeline of talent, supplemented by 40 apprentices each year. “We talk about opportunities in the industry, fast track progression, entrepreneurial skills and the career paths open to young people,” says Hever, himself an alumnus of the scheme.
“It’s about reaching graduates and talking to them in their space,” he adds. “Despite having 400 branches up and down the country, we can’t reach every student on campus, so our social media campaigns have been really good at drawing people to the website and attracting an audience that perhaps wouldn’t have considered us before.”
Many employers have turned to alumni of their graduate schemes to go back into universities and spread the word. Unilever recently handed over its Facebook page to its new graduates to talk to potential recruits.
It’s a similar situation in public sector placements, which are often perceived as having “a light touch”, says Rob Farace, senior programme lead resourcing manager at the NHS Leadership Academy. He relies on his trainees to give potentials an honest account of the scheme. “Students don’t want to hear from me – they want to know how to survive it from the people who are doing it,” he says.
“It’s a really useful way of getting across to the students what the course is really like and the challenges ahead. It’s a full-time job, with two or three different placements, which you might have to relocate for. Then we put you through a professional qualification, so it is tough.”
A ‘no holds barred’ account isn’t enough to scare off new joiners however. Farace’s small team receives over 15,000 applicants in every intake, across four disciplines: finance, general management, HR and health infomatics.
“We’re very lucky that former NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson is an alumnus of the scheme… so there is great buy-in and perception of our methods,” he says. “We are looking at the current shake-up to the university system nervously, wondering how that is going to affect the market, but at the moment we haven’t seen a dramatic change.”
2 Know who you’re hiring
Graduate recruitment is becoming crowded. Employers report that the economic downturn prompted those who left university as much as five years ago to revisit graduate schemes as a pathway into a job, further ramping up the competition for places.
It adds to the ongoing importance of being able to adequately assess talent. “If you’re happy to recruit historians, mathematicians, philosophers and economists as well as accountancy and finance graduates, we have to find a way of equally assessing these individuals,” says Stephen Isherwood, chief executive of the AGR. “The question is: how do we assess talent fairly but effectively?”
The NHS ‘Flexi-Placement’ is one potential answer. It aims to provide graduates with real on-the-job training, as well as assessing whether candidates are able to adapt to work in the real world. Tasked with finding their own eight-week placement outside the NHS, graduates have to give a presentation on why they’ve chosen the setting, the skills they will pick up and what learnings they can bring back to the NHS.
“It works really well and we always get good feedback from organisations who have welcomed our flexi-placement students,” says Farace. “We’ve even had to introduce anti-poaching clauses.”
Behavioural assessment may offer another route. Using a commercial tool, HR director Andrea Atkinson and her team at electronic engineering company Control Techniques believe they can gauge a graduate’s emotional and general intelligence, then tailor the placements to individual applicants.
3 Target the skills you need
Highly specialised businesses, or those in ultra-competitive sectors, may need an extra layer of innovation or sheer effort to attract the right talent. Bristol-based utility Ovo Energy works closely with local universities and educational institutions to target specialist skills, attending Thames Valley milk round events and speaking at STEM-based classes to highlight the benefits of building a career with a local SME.
“There is still a sense of aspiration to get on to a graduate programme,” says Kim Atherton, interim HR director at Ovo. “A well-developed scheme gives graduates a fast-track entry into the career of their choice… All but one of the graduates in our first intake three years ago have gone into management roles.”
Some businesses inevitably have to take a different path if they want to recruit graduates. Control Techniques has had trouble attracting technically competent graduates to its base in mid-Wales. In 2006, it jointly founded the E3 (Electrical, Energy, Engineering) Academy with partner universities Bristol, Newcastle and Nottingham.
Much like a corporate degree or other “earn and learn” schemes of the kind being pioneered by professional services and financial firms, the industrial partners financially support the candidates through their studies. But at E3, students also benefit from eight-week paid work placements at their sponsoring company each summer.
Facing severe cuts in public funding, six district authorities in Nottinghamshire, as well as Nottingham police authority and the local fire and rescue service, have agreed to work co-operatively, each contributing funding to the training of a pool of finance graduates. Completing the scheme with a Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) professional qualification, graduates are placed in either a full- or part-time role at one of the bodies, depending on need and available funding at the time. This collaborative approach enables each organisation to use only the trainee resource it needs and can afford.
4 Reboot your offer
At French-owned logistics company Norbert Dentressangle, a 30-year-old graduate scheme has developed much of the company’s senior talent. “Carol Vorderman was even on it at one point,” says logistics learning and development manager Chris Dolby. But after a huge spike in people leaving the programme early, the scheme needed a revamp.
“We rebranded the scheme to ‘Fast Track Talent Programme’ (FTTP) and opened it up to internal applicants, to make it flexible but at the same time give people assurances and realistic expectations of where they are going,” Dolby says. The two-year scheme includes six-month-long placements across logistics and warehousing, transport and traffic and an individually designed second year focused on the graduate’s career aspirations.
“We’re proud, because we have always struggled to get female applicants, but after increased marketing material and case study examples of successful women in logistics, six of the last nine graduates we took on were female,” says Dolby.
Gamification has a part to play too. In 2013, Deloitte piloted a business game entitled ‘Micro Tyco University Challenge’. Giving each undergraduate £1 and access to a Deloitte ‘expert’, they were tasked with making as much money as possible in a month. Twenty students have since been given a two-week placement with the business, where Fryer says they get a taste of the graduate offering before they leave university.
Whatever type of recruit you are trying to attract, the onus today is on creating a partnership between business and educators. Katerina Rudiger, head of skills and policy campaigns at the CIPD, believes the so-called ‘skills shortage’ in the UK has been largely exaggerated and “employers and recruiters shouldn’t be absolved of their responsibilities” when bridging the gap. “The skills are there,” she says. “Graduates just need help in expressing themselves at interview stage.”
“I am a big supporter of the universities. They deliver a lot of highly skilled and intelligent students and at Deloitte we take responsibility by saying we can’t expect graduates to have a fully developed skill set,” adds Fryer.
“Every graduate recruiter has long used qualifications to sift through the population of undergraduates, and there is some correlation between exam success and career potential, but it is a relatively crude tool so we are exploring ways to spot talent that perhaps hasn’t performed so well academically but could make a successful addition to the organisation.”
Evidentially, most would agree; in a poll of CIPD members in May, nearly 70 per cent said employers place too much weight on academic qualifications during the recruitment process. The majority of employers active in the graduate market recognise the benefits of bringing young people into the workplace, and are investing in apprenticeship, internship and work experience schemes alongside their graduate offerings.
Most employers now understand an over-reliance on graduates may be detrimental to diversity. One in five organisations plan to hire more apprentices this year, and 16 per cent already have a fully-fledged apprenticeship programme in motion, says the Spring 2014 CIPD Labour Market Outlook. Work experience placements and internships have been proven to bring benefits to both parties, providing inexperienced recruits with a trial period in a company, as well as being a recruitment tool in their own right: 85 per cent of organisations offer opportunities to young people after a spell on work experience, according to CIPD Learning to Work data.
The effects of the first cohort of fee-paying graduates reaching the labour market is hard to predict, and the landscape may be set for a further shake-up. But Rudiger says employers have nothing to fear: “The successful companies will be those who network, stay in touch with the market and adapt their recruitment processes to pre-empt the changes.”
277:1
Ratio of graduate applications to every successful hire into an HR role
£264k
Amount of extra revenue a female student with a 2:1 degree will generate over a lifetime
12m
University graduates in the UK population in 2013
4/10
Of the world’s young graduates will come from China and India by 2022
31%
Proportion of employers planning to hire graduates to plug hard-to-fill vacancies
£1,402
The median cost per graduate hire, 2012-13