Engineer Graduates, a unique new graduate recruitment and development company which provides programmes delivered during university, has selected WCN’s e-recruitment system to power the business.
Engineer Graduates is designed to ensure engineering undergraduate talent and even school talent is spotted, nurtured and moves smoothly into an engineering career. It will initially provide early stage graduate programmes to the chemicals, geotechnical, mining, utilities, energy, defense, aerospace, marine and technology sectors. The company already has a number of companies both large and small on board that are looking for candidates for 2013 drawn from 22 top engineering universities.
Steve Tope, WCN’s Director of Client Services, says: “Everyone is talking about the shortage of talent going into engineering, so to be working with a business committed to addressing this issue head on is tremendously exciting.”
The business is the brainchild of Carl Dawson, who previously managed graduate programmes for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). He explains the rationale behind his new business.
"I'd been delivering graduate programmes for 10 years and noticed that the conversations with graduates increasingly needed to take place earlier and earlier, for companies to stand a chance of recruiting the top talent they wanted – and not losing it to other sectors such as finance. So I felt there was a need for a new kind of graduate scheme. I also knew that a large part of its success would be dependent on the e-recruitment system behind it."
When working with the NDA Carl Dawson completed a full OJEU procurement round, examining all of the e-recruitment options in the market in the UK and across Europe, and WCN came out top: “Back in 2007 WCN blew the socks off the competition – they outperformed everyone, including the strong incumbent in the sector – and their support team is brilliant. Five years on and the system is even better. It is incredibly sophisticated in terms of what it can do, but at the same time very intuitive to use. It also has the strongest security features and negligible latency - both key considerations.”
Using WCN's system to manage the entire process, students are targeted by Engineer Graduates on campus during their first and second years, recruited, sifted, tested, put through assessment centres and then progressed to the interview stage with client companies, which then sponsor the selected students. The company typically looks through 3,500 applicants for 50 placements.
Engineer Graduates also provides the candidates with 6 modules of training, matches them to a mentor in the sponsoring organisation and gets the candidates themselves mentoring a14-16 year old school pupil. These school pupils in turn mentor a 12-14 year old. This all requires complex data handling capability and security.
Carl Dawson concludes: "We are all about plugging young talent into thinking about engineering much earlier on. This brings with it tremendous benefits as young people see a clear pathway to an engineering career, but it also adds on layers of complexity in terms of the people and data we're managing. I know we could not do it without the WCN system – or its team."
