Businesses should look at graduate recruitment as a long-term investment for their operations, one sector commentator has claimed.
Chris Morrall, recruitment management specialist at Talent Transitions, said that because of this, he would never halt the recruitment of graduates, even though the recession may be forcing many firms to look towards cutting their budgets.
He was commenting after BT announced it is set to be closing its graduate recruitment scheme, amid growing concern for the graduate jobs market.
"There are benefits to hiring a graduate and if people are seeing and realising those benefits then it shouldn’t be the start of other things to come," Mr Morrall said of the news.
BT has claimed that it will continue to review the status of its graduate recruitment programme and that it is committed to helping its 2009 entrants throughout their careers.
The Office for National Statistics recently revealed that the employment rate was 72.7 per cent in the three months to June 2009, down 0.9 percentage points on the previous three months.
Chris Morrall is wise to question BT’s reported decision to freeze or cancel graduate recruitment this year. The staff development consequences may cause serious problems for BT, or any other organisation considering similar short term tactical reactions to uncertainty about Recession and Recovery.
In 1973/4 Shell froze graduate recruitment for a year following the oil crisis. The consequences became stunningly obvious in senior staff career planning meetings a few months later. Typical meetings started with strategic moves for the senior high flyers, with succession planning moves working down the entire graduate career structure in the engineering and technology functions – until the bottom. These moves were locked because there were no new graduates to backfill the essential operational roles needed to free up the higher level moves.
The entire technical and managerial succession ladder was frozen for a year until the entry level was re-opened, or until external recruits could get up to speed with internal knowledge and procedures.
Dynamic organisations must keep career paths open while achieving staff reductions by releasing staff in non-critical functions, or by temporary layoffs available for rapid re-hire as soon as conditions permit.
Dai Williams, Career Consultant, Eos Career Services, Woking, Surrey