FMCG Graduate recruitment

This global FMCG organisation needed a graduate intake that reflected its diverse international markets and customers.

And the ability to identify individuals with high potential for future leadership roles. The ambition was to set a global standard of excellence for diversity and quality of hires.

A key aspect of the graduate programme was to find 'tomorrow's leaders'. And so we started there; determining what great future leaders for the organisation looked like.

In doing this, we dispelled several damaging talent myths. This included one we see often, that the university somebody graduates from predicts their future performance.

By gaining stakeholder alignment about existence of these myths and how they were used when recruiting, we were able to replace them with reliable and valid measures that did actually predict future performance. Crucially, they measured factors that are equally distributed irrespective of applicants' colour, race, or sexuality.

Having established the benchmark for a successful graduate candidate, we designed, configured and deployed an end-end hiring experience that recruited against this. It focused on testing collaboration over competition and was  immersive, fast-paced and fun. We called it The Final Audition and rolled it out across 25 countries, a truly equal playing field approach to recruitment.

From its launch, potential graduates said The Final Audition was a great first impression that increased their motivation to work for the company. More importantly, the new experience opened up talent pools and created a mix of successful candidates from varied socio-economic, ethnic and gender backgrounds.

• In UK alone the number of universities the organisation recruited from increased from 8 to 134.
• The number of female graduates increased from 38% to 51%
• The success rate at face-to-face interviews went from 25% to 40%
• The organisation became a leader in the FTSE 100 for the representation of women on boards
• In 2016 it ranked 11th out of 4,255 companies worldwide for diversity and inclusiveness in the Thomson Reuters Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Index