Graduate Recruitment and Development Forum 2016 – Webinar

Gordon Chesterman began his career in personnel, training and recruitment as a graduate trainee for a multinational company, and in 1983 he joined a major firm of chartered accountants as their graduate recruitment manager. After a period with a small publishing company in Cambridge and running his own training business, he joined the Careers Service in 1995 and was appointed Director in 2002.

Ben leads the CIPD’s Public Policy team, which works to inform and shape debate, government policy and legislation in order to enable higher performance at work and better pathways into work for those seeking employment. His particular research and policy areas of interest include employment relations, employee engagement and wellbeing, absence and stress management, and leadership and management capability.

Ben joined the CIPD in 2003. He started his career in regional journalism and prior to joining the CIPD was news editor and employment law editor at Personnel Today magazine.

Alastair is Business Development Manager at Saville Consulting, he manages a number of the business’ key accounts, including Thales, Prudential, Fujitsu, National Air Traffic Services, Capita and easyJet.

As a Business Psychologist, Alastair uses his consultative approach with clients and prospects to promote best practice in organisational selection and assessment. Alastair is passionate about empowering clients, building bespoke solutions to exceed client needs. Recent projects include aligning the Saville Consulting suite of assessment tools to organisational competency models, developing and implementing assessment centre materials for graduate selection programmes and embedding a variety of tools within a major corporation to facilitate selection at all levels of recruitment, from apprentices to board level. The nature of Alastair’s role requires that he is adept in the full range of the Saville Consulting portfolio of services, particularly psychometric assessments (for screening, selecting and developing talent), tailored training courses and psychometric consultancy services.

Rob Farace has worked in HR for over twenty years and has specialised in resourcing, with a particular focus on graduate schemes. In his current role, he is responsible for recruitment to the NHS Leadership Academy Programmes – including the award-winning NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme and the Aspiring CEO Programme.

Rob started his career with the London Borough of Barnet before moving to the Children’s Society and later to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, where he set up their graduate scheme. He subsequently played a key role in the biggest charity merger which created Cancer Research UK. At CR-UK Rob went onto to set up the resourcing function for the new organisation which included the introduction of several graduate & PhD training schemes, recruiting the board for the new organisation and helping set up a new research facility in Cambridge.

Rob has a variety of roles in addition to his day job including being a Board of Director for the Association of Graduate Recruiters and Charity Works (a unique Graduate Development Programme for the charity sector) and is a member of the Bright Futures Society Advisory Board and the CIPD Resourcing Steering Committee.

Alex joined L’Oréal from Bath University as an intern in 2011 working within the Graduate Recruitment space and was subsequently appointed to the permanent role coordinating graduate activities. After a short spell outside of the Company at the BBC in 2014 Alex returned to L’Oreal as the HR Officer within the HR Retail team working with the Beauty Consultants and field teams. Alex has recently been appointed as the Graduate Talent Manager, bringing a wealth of knowledge of the graduate arena, an expertise in assessing graduate talent and the passion to drive a creative programme of activities with a social and digital steer.

Phil focuses on the design, diversity and evaluation of Fast Stream – the graduate talent management programme for the Civil Service. He also oversees the award winning Summer Diversity Internship Programme, the Early Diversity Internship Programme, Autism Internship Programme and Intern Coaching Programme and many other positive action and outreach activities. Prior to this role he was Head of Occupational Psychology at the London Fire Brigade, as well as Acting Head of Occupational Psychology for Greater Manchester Police and has also operated as a consultant for a range of industries. He has presented at numerous professional conferences, undertaken a variety of media activities and chaired national work psychology committees.

Julie is a Fellow of the CIPD, she graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in Psychology and Educational studies and has always had a keen interest in Employee Development.

Having held a number of line Human Resources and Employee Development roles within the rail industry and Rolls-Royce, Julie has returned fully to her first love of graduate development and is currently the Rolls-Royce Global Company Graduate Development Manager.

Julie has over 15 years experience of graduate recruitment, development and Talent Management for a number of functional programmes.

Julie is responsible for the development globally of approx 350 graduates a year. She is responsible for developing the strategy for development and post programme placement in close partnership with the business and function stakeholders. Julie manages the implementation of this strategy through a global team of development consultants.

Alison has almost twenty years’ experience of the graduate recruitment industry and has worked on the supplier side as well as the employer side. In that time, her roles have given her experience of all aspects of recruitment from attraction through to assessment.

She spent 10 years working on a huge variety of recruitment campaigns for Flag, a design and communications agency. In 2005, Alison joined KPMG to lead the recruitment marketing team and was responsible for both graduate and experienced hire marketing working on everything from websites to campus sessions, from employee referral programmes to virtual events. Two years later she became increasingly involved in recruitment marketing for firms across the EMA region.

In 2010 her role expanded to include the graduate recruitment operations team. With the introduction of a range of school leaver programmes a year later, Alison played a key role in bringing recruitment, marketing and CSR together to demonstrate KPMG’s commitment to widening participation to the profession.

Alison joined GSK as Global University Relations Director in 2014.

Alison has been involved in the AGR in a number of different ways over the years including the Education & Training Task group, the conference planning team, and presenting on AGR workshops and courses.

Hannah is responsible for the delivery of global recruitment campaigns for leading graduate brands across a wide variety of sectors. Hannah previously worked for GTI as an account manager from 2003-2007 before taking up a role leading Graduate Recruitment at the Financial Services Authority (FSA). During her five years at the regulator Hannah was responsible for the FSA’s marketing strategy and delivery, selection design and execution, and programme management of the FSA’s graduate development programme, specialist schemes, and undergraduate and MBA intern programmes. She also spent 12 months leading the experienced hires recruitment team. Hannah led a full selection review and redesign at the FSA which resulted in them winning the AGR Selection and Assessment Award in 2008 and has presented at a number of seminars on recruitment best practice. In 2012 Hannah re-joined GTI who are a world leader in graduate recruitment with businesses in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Singapore, Malaysia and China. During 27 years of specialising in graduate recruitment GTI have developed a worldwide network of university career services and departments, student and alumni societies, as well as graduate marketing channels. Many of the clients GTI work with draw on their global expertise to reach graduates they would find it impossible to attract without GTI Recruiting Solutions.

Rob has over 15 years experience working in recruitment across banking, manufacturing and professional services and has  spent the last 5 years as Head of Student Recruitment at Deloitte.

Rob has a Masters in Human Resource Management and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Association of Graduate Recruiters and Leicester University Careers Advisory service.

In Jonathan’s role as Senior Client Partner, he develops and manages client relationships, helping them to make better informed people recruitment and development decisions, as part of their overall talent management strategy, through the use of a variety of assessment tools.

Jonathan has worked with a number of sectors, including working with Higher Education Institutions to improve the student transition from academia into the workplace through the development of core employability skills. An area of focus for Jonathan is the graduate recruitment and selection process, using his knowledge of the graduate market to support clients in delivering best practice as part of their overall employee value proposition (EVP).

Emma has specialised in student recruitment and development for 17 years.  She is currently Head of Student Recruitment at EY, one of the largest student recruiters in the UK. Emma started her career at EY where she qualified as a Chartered Accountant.  After an internal secondment to Student Recruitment and time managing the National Exam Training team, Emma became Head of Student Recruitment in 2005.She was responsible for new initiatives such as the ‘EY Degree’ and the firm’s transition to Strengths Based Recruitment which itself paved the way for more recent innovations. In 2010 Emma become Head of UK Student Recruitment at BP. During this time, she worked with the team to transform their selection process and student engagement strategy. BP rose to their highest ever ranking in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers and won the Times Top 100 Best Engineering Recruiter award. Emma is now an independent Graduate Recruitment and Development Consultant working with a variety of public and private sector clients.

Bob has a first degree in Mathematical Modelling as well as an Executive MBA and began his career as Students Union President. After this Bob worked for companies such as Tesco, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and graduate-jobs.com.

In 2006, he joined RWE npower as Head of Graduate Schemes responsible for both recruitment and development of graduates, and during his last 18 months was the HR Business Partner to the CEO and CFO direct reports. During the 5 1/2 years at RWE npower, Bob and his team transformed the npower brand into one of the most dynamic, visible and successful brands in graduate recruitment and development. In 2008 RWE npower won both awards that year for Innovation on Campus for the much acclaimed “npower energy challenge”.

Bob is recognised as an industry expert, a regular International conference speaker, as well as a former Board member of the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR). In 2011 ‘Getting it Right’, of which he is a co-author, was published, this is the first book in the UK aimed at graduate recruiters and developers.

In 2012 Bob joined the University of Leicester to become the Director of the Career Development Service to lead a step change in University and employer collaboration. In 2014 Bob was promoted to Director of Student Experience.

Samantha Hope is the Graduate Recruitment Manager at Shoosmiths, which is the fastest growing national law firm in the UK. Samantha is responsible for managing the entire process of resourcing and developing trainee solicitors from initial attraction to qualification. This involves coordinating internships and training contracts across the firm’s 10 office locations from Southampton to Edinburgh.

Samantha possesses an in-depth knowledge and interest in the use of digital media for recruitment and marketing. She manages events internally, on campus and digitally to develop and assess the skills of future trainee solicitors.

She is a keen speaker and writer about social recruiting, digital engagement and widening access to a career in law.

Helen leads the Assessment business, overseeing the company’s assessment strategy and implementation. She also leads the Consulting business at Capp, ensuring the high standard of delivery across our assessment clients. A chartered psychologist, she is an experienced statistician with particular expertise in psychometric development and strengths-based solutions. Helen is particularly passionate about evaluating the robustness of psychometric solutions, ensuring our innovative products support diversity, fairness and stand up to statistical scrutiny. She has a wide portfolio of assessment clients, including experienced hire, graduate and apprentice across a range of sectors, who are regularly recognised for their innovative and high-quality assessment solutions. She has published in practitioner journals including Assessment and Development Matters as well as international journals, including Psychology of Wellbeing on her work in strengths-based interventions.