Apprentice and School leaver market
Disruptive apprenticeship recruitment
Simon Reichwald Strategic Lead for Emerging Talent, MyKindaFuture and Honorary Vice President of ISE
Apprentice recruitment represents a significant proportion of Rolls-Royce’s annual intake of young people. The high volumes of applications received to date have predominantly been for Practical and Technical Advanced Apprentices, but with not enough of the ‘right calibre’ Higher Apprentice candidates applying and making it through to hire via traditional attraction & recruitment activity. Simon Reichwald, Strategic Lead for Emerging Talent, MyKindaFuture and Honorary Vice President of ISE, demonstrates how MyKindaFuture used disruptive recruitment to find these candidates.
As the competition for talent continues to grow, especially for Higher Apprentices into STEM careers, there was a recognised need to not just do more but do something different.
Rolls-Royce sought to bring innovation to their Higher Apprentice recruitment activity, which would engage, inform and inspire, as well as attract a broader range of young people, which meant more females and those from more diverse groups than traditionally applied.
The ‘disruptive’ recruitment programme was designed by MyKindaFuture to achieve a number of key outcomes: (1) target and engage more of that diverse talent, (2) improve the conversion rates on assessment days, (3) help the young people participating to really get to know the Rolls-Royce business and to understand for themselves the opportunities offered by a higher apprenticeship route. It was also hugely important to engage the young people’s parents – and influence the ‘influencers’.
The key point of difference when creating this disruptive programme was based around the principle of: ‘Train young people first, then assess them; don’t assess them then train them…’
Research shows that young people can be daunted by rigorous assessment and selection processes, when they have so little experience of it; it also demonstrated that those from less advantaged backgrounds often under-perform compared to more advantaged young people, or worse still don’t apply at all.
30 TheStudentEmployer
ise.org.uk
How did the programme work? 1. MyKindaFuture engaged with a network of Year 13 teachers in targeted schools, discussed the opportunities that Higher Apprenticeships offer, and asked the teachers to then identify students who were predicted to achieve the high grades required but either did not want to go to university or who were undecided.
2. Those students were spoken to by their teachers and those who showed an interest in finding out more were invited by MyKindaFuture to attend a bespoke apprenticeship workshop at Rolls Royce offices.
3. The workshop was followed up a few weeks later with a finale event. Those students who both performed well at the workshop and showed a desire to learn more were invited to this event, along with their parents. Every student who attended the final day was then guaranteed a place on an assessment day. The workshop and finale days were hosted at Rolls-Royce and designed and delivered by MyKindaFuture, whose role was to bring to life the opportunities available, position higher apprenticeships as a highly credible option post school, and to do so in a highly engaging and interactive manner.
So no long online application, no telephone or video interviews, no online tests (until they had been shown how), and that’s what we call ‘disruptive recruitment’.
Lindsay Cotton – Early Careers Recruitment Consultant, Rolls-Royce
“MyKindaFuture have been a fantastic emerging talent partner for Rolls-Royce
over the last 12 months. They have helped us effectively identify and attract young people into our business for our apprenticeship programmes and have done so in an extremely engaging and innovative way – bringing our business to life for this pool of future talent.
MyKindaFuture’s strong network and relationships with schools has helped us efficiently promote the opportunities to teachers and students, whilst helping us build sustainable relationships close to our sites, that we will build on long-term.”
Evidence
Of 384 schools engaged, 128 Year 13 students (24% female) were identified and, of these, 67 passed the eligibility criteria.
40 were invited and, of those, 32 attended the workshop (34% female).
19 attended the finale event (42% female), along with 29 parents.
18 went onto assessment days, 11 were offered jobs, all accepted and started with Rolls-Royce (6 are female).
Evaluation from the young people:
82% of respondents felt more confident about their career as a result of attending one of these events.
77% felt more confident about the recruitment process.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46
