Lets not forget, graduates are people too

As the graduate recruitment period looms, SHL Group warns UK Plc to embrace diversity and move away from a one-size fits all recruitment programme.

Graduates make up a large proportion of the professional work seeking population every year and the number of university attendees has continued to increase from 2000 despite the introduction of tuition fees. Candidates who are successfully accepted onto graduate training schemes are likely to start on a better salary and have the expectation of enhanced role diversity and better training and development opportunities thanks to ëfast-trackí schemes. For these reasons and more, graduate schemes are in demand.

ìGraduate programmes may be large in volume depending on the organisation, but recruiters must bear in mind that they are dealing with individuals, not identikits,î states James Bywater, head psychologist at SHL.

The number of candidates and the costs involved often make too many organisations treat the recruitment of the new generation of employees as an operation rather than proper human resources.

As Bywater states, ìIt is too easy to view these processes as industrial problems and turn them into Henry Ford style production lines. However, there are many circumstances where this process model no longer works. As consumers we are now more accustomed to ìmass customisationî in our goods and services:

- We have a choice of options and colours when we buy a car.

- We favour websites that allow us to customise our experience e.g. Amazon.

- We react badly to getting poorly segmented mail merge email (spam) and junk mail.

- It is likely that these preferences will increasingly start to affect graduate recruitment too.

It also has other benefits ñ not only do consumers of these customised processes prefer them, but they allow you to make small but significant adjustments to processes to accommodate candidates unique wishes and requirements in an effective manner. Since having a diverse workforce delivers long-term creativity to organisations, this has got to be a good thing. Being aware of the benefits of diversity and the mix of strengths in the graduate pool will attract and, importantly, retain the top talent.

ìIt is about making the machine personal. By taking steps to customise graduate intake process to some extent for each individual, recruiters are likely to find that they are grasping the substance of the people they recruit, not just their image. This is sure to affect the engagement of graduate intake.î

Mass customisation in practice ñ Tips for graduate recruiters

Do
Make provision for candidates with disabilities, e.g. larger print options for the partially sighted

Alter the type of assessment candidates are put through to reflect the type of role you are recruiting for, e.g. a logical reasoning test for an IT role, or a verbal test for an HR or communications role.

Ask the graduates what they want e.g. choice of communication medium, amount of contact from you, timing of interviews

Adapt your communications to meet the needs of the audience -use plain English, not business-speak

Donít
Put in place hurdles that are there for some candidates but not for others applying to the same role, such as testing for different development areas ñ this will remove objectivity from the process

Automatically do whatever people tell you they want, departmental managers for example. You need to think in terms of designing an objective process that will yield the right people for the job. Be confident of your expertise in this.

Neglect to put yourself in the candidateís shoes ñ their patience will have limits!

James Bywater, Head Psychologist at SHL, will be speaking at the AGR conference 8 -10 July 2007.