Looking within Progressing your current staff


Harnessing the power within


With the Apprenticeship Levy, the Government has created an incentive for companies to take on apprentices. It is a positive step, says Melanie Hayes, Resourcing and Development Director at Compass Group UK & Ireland. But before employers go scrambling into the marketplace for an army of new apprentices, they would do well to look at the talent within their own walls.


Clearly, these channels


are perfect for the Snapchat generation.


However, we are equally committed to attracting older applicants from within the organisation too.


Statement, it is a levy that will apply to every large employer across every industry. The aim is to fund three million new apprenticeships by 2020. Under the proposed system, employers will be able to offset this cost, and even receive extra funding, if they recruit and train apprentices themselves.


T


Will this inspire a resurgence in the apprenticeship scheme? Only time will tell. What is certain is that my organisation, a FTSE 100 catering and support services company, will be increasing its numbers. We intend to recruit 1,500 new apprentices by the end of 2017.


It is a bold target. Granted, we are not starting from square one: we have been successfully running apprenticeship schemes for some time, and have filled 3,000 places in the past five years. Yet even so, it still represents a three-fold increase on anything we have ever done before.


That’s right. 300%. So why am I not curling into a ball and gently weeping right now?


26 00 Graduate Recruiter | www.agr.org.uk


innovative ways for us to engage with our people – ideas that go way beyond the predictable poster in the staff canteen.


he Apprenticeship Levy is very important for employers. Unveiled in last year’s Autumn


The answer is simple: this year, we are not going to rely solely on traditional recruitment. Instead our apprentice drive will be focused just as much on existing Compass employees as well as external candidates.


For a business like ours, this makes sense. We have many people who come in casually, but are looking for something more meaningful. (Indeed, one of the reasons we developed our apprenticeships in the first place was to nurture this talent. Staff turnover is a notoriously big issue for the food services sector.)


We have always encouraged our people to apply for these apprenticeships. This year, however, we will be stepping things up and promoting our scheme like never before. This might sound simple, but it is a big challenge when you are a highly dispersed organisation like ours. Our employees are spread over 10,000 different sites.


To help us connect with them, we have worked very closely with Blackbridge, our communications agency. As well as designing the creative for the new campaign, they have helped us devise a channel strategy. They have created


For example, we are referring to using Facebook at Work, a pilot version of the social network that is designed for use within companies. We will also be promoting our schemes on MySocial, our own internal social network, which lives on Connect, our company intranet. We will also be running our campaign on ‘traditional’ social media.


Clearly, these channels are perfect for the Snapchat generation. However, we are equally committed to attracting older applicants from within the organisation too. Research shows these candidates are more engaged by face-to-face interactions, so we are planning to produce briefing packs for managers to promote our schemes internally. These will be complemented by HTML emails, adverts in our staff magazines, and on- site collateral.


Creating these campaigns takes planning, but it has not broken the budget. Many companies still think apprenticeship schemes are too much effort – that finding the next generation of apprentices is too costly and time- consuming. But as I hope I have shown here, the answer is often right under your nose.


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