These were the words of wisdom bestowed on fresh graduates at a graduation ceremony by Jon Bon Jovi. At first glance, perhaps these are fleeting words with little meaning, but let’s take a second glance. In 2013 the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) reported that leading UK employers received an average of 85 applications per job. With these kinds of figures, graduates certainly need persistence and perhaps passion to set them apart from the 84 other candidates. But are graduate recruiters taking notice of passion in their quest to attract and select graduates and go on to nurture and develop them once on board?
As graduate recruiters make their preparations for the forthcoming graduate recruitment season, we take a look at the challenges ahead and put the spotlight on passion as the key difference between selecting high performers who stay and can even go on to be future leaders, from selecting average performers who leave within a few years.
Aligning culture and values
It’s long been accepted that a range of assessment processes are deployed to identify and select the best graduates from the vast pool of applicants. By circumstance, graduates tend not to have a great deal of relevant experience to the world of work, meaning that these assessments are critical to identifying those with the potential to do the job well. But is ‘doing the job well’ enough? And if it is, why then do we hear comments like ‘she left because the company wasn’t right for her’, or ‘he’s just not performing; his heart just doesn’t seem to be in it’? Having the requisite skills, abilities and competencies to perform in a job is just the foundation of what it takes to be successful at work. To really perform in any organisation, employees must want to perform. This means that they must be engaged, have aligned values with the organisation and possess a passion and desire to deploy their efforts to achieve the goals of the business.
By understanding your organisation’s culture and values, you can build a framework of what really engages and motivates graduates in your organisation. You can then use this to assess candidates and identify those that have ‘engageability’ i.e. those that have the potential to be engaged in your organisation. For example, take a charity organisation whose core value and mission is making a difference to the wider community; they value people who are supportive and caring towards others. Let’s imagine the charity has two great graduates shortlisted, both of which have all of the core skills, abilities and competencies to be able to perform the job well. The first candidate is primarily driven by achieving difficult targets and pushing themselves to meet goals; the second is passionate about having a positive impact on others and providing benefit to people in and outside of the organisation. Put like this it may be easy to recognise that whilst they both have the potential to do the job equally well, the latter candidate is more likely to be passionate, driven and aligned to the organisation’s goals.
What’s the benefit?
In practical terms, the employees who are more engaged offer businesses more value, over and above their talented, but disengaged counterparts. Hay Group has shown that organisations with highly engaged employees demonstrate revenue growth 2.5 times greater than organisations with disengaged employees. What’s more, the engaged and passionate employees are those that will stay with an organisation long-term, because they are not only good at what they do, but they are committed to the organisation and its goals. Ashridge Business School found that 57% of UK graduates intended to remain in their current role for just two years. They reported that graduates were comfortable exploring different jobs and wouldn’t hesitate to move on if they felt their job wasn’t meeting their ideals or expectations. Whilst many focus their efforts on increasing the engagement of their current employees, forward thinking organisations are recruiting graduates who have the highest potential to engage with the company, through aligned values between the individual and the organisation.
Making great leaders
Once recruited, many organisations then look to their graduate intake to identify their future leaders via a high potential programme. Identification of high potentials is a much-debated topic, as getting the selection process right, is absolutely critical. These ‘high potential’ individuals will have heavy resources invested in them with a view of creating a strong bench strength for the future. However, many identification programmes fail to identify people with the requisite potential to lead the company in the future. Others will go on to leave before they even finish the programme and this is because organisations often fall in to one of two traps; they select people on the basis of their current performance, often using subjective assessment criteria, rather than on their potential to lead as measured by objective assessment. Or, they select people with the potential to lead, but not the passion and desire to do so.
We’ve heard of highly talented, well performing graduates leaving organisations simply because they have been selected to be on a high potential programme when they did not wish to be on it. This means that not only have they left the programme and organisation, but they have also taken their talent elsewhere, most likely to a competitor. High potential programmes require great investment from the individuals as well as the organisation. They must invest their time, energy and commitment to meet the demands of the programme, often in addition to their ‘day job’. To do this, the individual has to have a commitment to the future of the organisation, they have to have aligned values and they have to have the desire to deploy their extra efforts to become future leaders: this is passion.
While this is a trap that many fall in to, it can be mitigated. This comes down to using an objective assessment to measure the individuals’ motivations (drive) and aligning that with both the requirements of the programme as well as the future strategy, culture and values of the organisation. For example, if an organisation is setting part of its strategy and competitive advantage around being innovative in the products or services that it creates, it’s probably important that future leaders are also driven and passionate about being innovative and pioneering. A lack of alignment here would cause frustration for the individual as they may not see the value in investing and promoting innovation. This may mean a quick exit for the individual, however what would happen if the individual did stick with the organisation and indeed became a leader? How would the strategy be impacted? How would others in the organisation respond to this individual? What would the effect on the culture be? The outcome of a wrong identification of a high potential employee, due to miss-alignment between the individual and the organisation, can at best lead to the individual leaving, and at worst can have catastrophic impacts to the organisation.
This year’s challenge
This year the job of a graduate recruiter is set to be more complex and demanding than ever before. Graduate vacancies are set to reach the highest they have been since 2007 with a forecasted increase of 10.2% this summer (AGR Graduate Recruitment Survey 2014: Winter Review). This means more positions to fill, greater workloads for recruiters and compounds the issue of being able to find the ‘right’ candidate for the role and the organisation. The challenge is certainly set forth for this graduate recruitment season, but in order for recruiters to keep the faith, as Bon Jovi might encourage, recruiters can incorporate methods to select individuals who are passionate and driven by factors that are aligned to the organisation, and in doing so reap the benefits. These benefits will be evident in not only greater employee retention and increased productivity but also a stronger bench strength further down the line.
