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Data The homogenisation of talent


Cultural Conformity


It was not so long ago that it made sense to adapt your approach to graduate recruitment primarily based on the country in which you were recruiting. While this may still have some validity for graduate recruitment generally, Graeme Wright, Strategy Director at Havas People believes it is no longer true for those top graduates targeted by many multi-nationals – a group known as the ‘Graduate Elite’…


T Cumulative


cultural adaptation is not going away,


rather it is accelerating. Tellingly Generation Z is looking like the most geographically homogenous


generation ever


he Graduate Elite can be any nationality but are likely to speak English, have gone to a first or second university


outside their home country (unless they are English or American) and be largely open-minded as to where they work geographically. They are also flexible about which industry they end up in. Many undergraduates studying engineering at top ranked universities fall into this group and they are as likely to be considering a career in banking, consultancy or technology as ‘traditional’ engineering.


Mirroring this development, many multi-national graduate recruiters have ‘fast-track’ graduate programmes into which they recruit with little thought for the nationality of the entrant – that is an irrelevance, because what they are looking for is not the best recruits in any one country but the best recruits globally. A great example of this is the Total Graduate School: each year


Total identifies some of the brightest graduates from around the world and invites them to a one week conference in Paris to discuss and learn about key issues impacting on the oil and chemical industries. An example of the unifying nature of today’s world on graduates is the video Havas made with them to celebrate the event (vimeo. com/99549248). It shows undergraduates from all over the world uniformly interacting with a piece of popular culture.


This trend is picking up apace and real differences between graduates at all levels are starting to disappear – we can


call this process ‘cumulative cultural adaptation’, and it is driven by travel, the internet, social networking and the desire of multi-nationals to deliver a consistent experience around the world (there are differences between McDonalds, Starbucks, Allianz or Next around the globe but they are not nearly as striking as what the brands share in terms of common messaging and experience).


From a graduate perspective, the process of homogenisation is particularly acute as they are largely united by common goals, activities and technologies. Havas has recently undertaken extensive research into graduate recruitment in 15 different markets and in this research has found the mass of students moving rapidly towards a homogenous state with differences in everything from recruitment process to media usage rapidly disappearing. The most obvious example of this is the use of social media where regional sites such as Orkut in Brazil have been surpassed by Facebook; or the ever-growing global reach of LinkedIn. (See box out)


However, it is in the arena of recruitment process that similarities are most apparent; even in Japan the shinsotsu (the traditional recruitment process) is evolving to meet the challenges of globalisation and this means adapting process and procedure in the rest of the world.


Cumulative cultural adaptation is not going away, rather it is accelerating. Tellingly Generation Z is looking like the most geographically homogenous generation ever – in a recent survey over a quarter of


this generation said most of their friends were over a plane ride away… Organisations need to put a far greater emphasis on global approaches to marketing – and we are seeing this development in the market at the moment.


Key aspects are: • Consistent global employee proposition.


• Unified approach to social and community management. • A focus on global platforms.


Rather than looking for marketing differences between student populations, recruiters need to consider first what unifies them.


The rise of internationalism on global media platforms… • Facebook is used by 63% of social media uses and is available in 70 languages.


• YouTube is localised in 61 countries and across 61 languages.


• Apple now launches its products simultaneously around the world.


• LinkedIn has 313 million members in over 200 countries and territories.


• The highest percentage of Twitter users relative to population are in Saudi. Arabia and Indonesia. The highest number of total users are in China – despite a government ban on the site.


• Google has a 68% share of global searches. n


www.agr.org.uk | Graduate Recruiter 21


www.havaspeople.com


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