INTERVIEW WITH


AN INTERVIEW WITH...


A series of interviews with AGR Board Members


BOB ATHWAL


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Bob was the fastest ever graduate to reach branch manager status, putting him in a strong


position to move into graduate recruitment for London and the South East.


28 GRADUATE RECRUITER


He moved seamlessly from helping students to stand up for their rights as Student Union President, to helping graduates get jobs. We talk to Bob Athwal, Director of Career Development Service, University of Leicester.


I went to university because I didn’t know what else to


do, and I did what I was good at as opposed to what I was interested in. But when I was elected President of the Students Union at Greenwich University I began to understand what I really enjoyed - people.” Bob Athwal has, unusually, worked as a supplier, a


recruiter twice and – since January 2012 – headed up a university careers service, completing the golden graduate recruitment triangle, if you will. It means he is well placed to tackle a sizeable challenge in his new role. “Students can’t just come to university and get a degree anymore. We have to help them to stand out from the crowd and drive and manage their own careers, because they will have to reinvent themselves several times.” To face the challenge, Bob is drawing on his vast


experience, which began briefly at Tesco, where he lasted 90 days on the retailer’s graduate management scheme. “I liked what I was doing but I didn’t like the environment. I was up against people who had left school at 14 and worked their way up and they didn’t like grads coming in at the same level.” (Bob recognises that Tesco today is vastly different and is a strong graduate employer). He left and joined Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s Graduate scheme where he says he honed what he had learnt as President of the Student Union, and had begun to learn at Tesco. “It was about helping to influence people. I became quite good at it and in 2000 I started to think about a change of direction into HR.” At the time, Bob was the fastest ever graduate to reach branch manager status, putting him in a strong position to move into graduate recruitment for London and the South East. “It was Enterprise that really built my passion for graduate recruitment per se. It was the best career move I ever made.” It stood him in good stead. He was later headhunted by


RWE npower as Head of Graduate Schemes, and went on to make the energy supplier one of the most recognised brands on campus. “In 2008 we won the Innovation on Campus Award for AGR and Target Jobs. It cemented the fact that graduate recruitment was my calling.” His cause


was strengthened by his interim move to the supplier side – graduatejobs.com – for 18 months while he studied for his MBA at the University of Southampton. “I didn’t want to work for another employer as a graduate recruiter. I had just worked for a phenomenal company (Enterprise) and I didn’t want to prostitute myself. I wanted a different perspective.” His unique experience in the graduate recruitment space has also helped him to play a valuable role on the AGR Board over the last four years, and it is here that he saw one of his biggest successes – redesigning the Graduate Development Award. “Graduate development has to be joined up with the wider learning and development practices of the organisation regarding talent management. For this reason I felt that different companies would have different parts of the process to shout about, so I broke the award (created by Sonja Stockton) into segments. Graduate developers saw the relevance and credibility in it.” The move helped to significantly boost the popularity of AGR’s one day conference and awards. Bob’s success is rooted in his almost tangible zeal for graduate recruitment and development, an enthusiasm which was underlined by an 18 month departure as HR Business Partner to the CEO at RWE npower, prior to his move to the University of Leicester. “Graduate recruitment and development has been at the forefront of driving innovation and change for many years and I was really missing that.” He is now back where he belongs – albeit on the other side of the fence – relishing a very appealing opportunity. “The University of Leicester has intellectually smart students that have good levels of emotional intelligence; the challenge is to ensure that graduate employers are aware of the facts.” Such is his commitment to his new role that he spends the working week in Leicester and travels home to his wife and three young children in Hampshire every Friday night. “Not uncommonly, the hardest part is going back to work on Mondays, but it has definitely been the right move.” Hear, hear.


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