EARLY CAREERS
HOW TO BUILD AN EARLY CAREERS STRATEGY
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…young people from underprivileged backgrounds may not have been exposed to traditional assessments, so they will be automatically disadvantaged should you use one. Forget any tokenistic approaches for diversity. Do not treat young people like animals in a circus.
What is an Early Career? Does my organisation need an Early Career strategy? Is it purely programmatic and focused on graduates, interns and apprentices or does it cover the entire first jobbers population? And how do we develop such a strategy? Francesca Campalani, Head of Early Career Research & Design, Group Talent at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) offers some answers…
1. Decide what you want. Does “Early Career” cover all of your young people, your entry level, school and university leavers, or do you want it to be specific for only those considered as early talent? If you do not know what you want, you’re sure to get something else…
2. Decide why you want an Early Career strategy. Decide what your main driver is – resourcing, talent, or cost? Look at Early Career in the same way you would look at a pair of trainers: do you want them to be cool, comfortable, long-lasting, or cheap? Decide what is really important and stick with it.
3. Recognise the different make-up of the Early Career employee segment: i) a coherent generational mix; ii) at a different cognitive stage; iii) at an early professional phase. The core of this strategy consists in recognising the ‘fluid’ nature of this group as a whole: they are aged 16 to 24 and moving from school to work. It is a segment that thinks, behaves and engages differently – like the ‘executive’ segment, it needs a dedicated frameworks while, at the same time, having to be in line with the overall talent strategy.
4. Link your Early Career strategy to your Workforce planning. Be true to yourself.
5. Recruit for potential. These are people that have probably never worked before and if you base your selection on past attainments, it can be a bit like asking a fish to fly. Understand what talent looks like and how it could appear in its embryonic state. Recruiting for potential is both an art and a science and it requires ‘forecasting magic’. Use a non predictable and non-Taylor-like* competencies framework. Most ‘well educated’ young people have been trained to ‘give’ stereotypical answers; you might not be able to differentiate. Focus on a
12 GRADUATE RECRUITER
dynamic framework based on archetypal agilities, predictors of potential and cognitive and non- cognitive attributes.
6. If you want diversity, you need to do things differently. For example, young people from underprivileged backgrounds may not have been exposed to traditional assessments, so they will be automatically disadvantaged should you use one. Forget any tokenistic approaches for diversity. Do not treat young people like animals in a circus. Understand the value of inclusion and the richness that diversity brings: embrace it, embed it, and reward it.
7. Early Career is a rite of passage from school to work so it has to be transformational and relevant to young people.
8. An Early Career development journey can range from a structured accreditation programme to a set of recommendations and development interventions. The overall aim should be to engage and transform the whole segment recognising the extra support they (and their line managers) need. Induction and first year are the key factors for the transition from school to work.
9. Talent for this segment looks different from talent at a later professional stage given that it is more focused on future predictors of potential than evidence of past attainment. There is no ‘one size fits all’.
10. Whatever you decide to do, never disconnect your Early Career strategy from the ideal line that links your junior employees to your executive talent. The first rule of the Early Career club is congruency. The second rule of the Early Career club is congruency. Once. Again.
* Taylorism sees people aligned to specific tasks and not as a whole gestalt / system.
www.rbs.co.uk
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