It came and it went, launched then quickly expired. Blink and you missed it. Although I suspect many of us missed it at the time, I fancy few miss it now. Just nine weeks after its introduction, Britain’s youngest newspaper, New Today, is no more. Old news, in fact. The first new standalone newspaper in 30 years and hoping to sell some 200,000 copies a day, it failed to reach a quarter of that number. The paper attempted to target time-poor readers and deliver them an optimistic take on the news.
All fine in principle until we get to the overall strategy of New Today which was to target readers who don’t read newspapers. With a chunky 50p price tag and no online offering, New Today’s aspirations felt overly optimistic in the extreme.
However, in a sense, they did indeed reach out to people who don’t read newspapers. And the newspapers such people don’t read included New Today.
We came across similar examples of the law of unintended consequences with some entry level talent research TMP conducted with a range of major blue chip employers this last month.
The research touched on a slew of fascinating insights into what entry level talent was looking for from both a scheme and an employer. Perhaps the most revealing of which was the feeling of impatience such people can feel in their first role post university. It’s perhaps no major surprise that graduates even new to a scheme want to make a difference from day one.
But how does this relate to unintended consequences?
The last decade has seen a massive shift in the importance attached to internships and work experience. The majority of the UK’s major graduate recruiters are unlikely to hire students without a CV dotted liberally with employment interventions. The contrast with my own student holidays and those of my daughter’s could scarcely be more marked. Whereas I wandered into employment somewhat haphazardly, via a series of less than glamorous jobs, she has already spent a summer with a consultancy firm and the current year with a scientific organisation.
And the implications of this?
Graduates entering a formal graduate programme might now have three or four examples of robust work experience behind them when they join a programme. They have a solid grasp of the workplace, its expectations and its demands. They are impatient to achieve, to make a difference, to contribute. However, are the programmes and schemes they enter geared up for entry level joiners with so much experience and so much exposure? Or were they originally constructed with an individual with little or no such experience? Are they designed with the current generation of university leavers in mind?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be overly surprised then if graduate joiners feel thwarted and frustrated, feeling they are going over old ground rather than taking in new and challenging experiences.
There was a practical element to our learnings too. And one again related to the issue of unintended consequences. Businesses continue to attach understandable importance to the digital skills that graduates bring with them.
But are such businesses doing enough themselves from a technology standpoint?
Today’s entry level talent are firmly within Murdoch’s digital natives’ camp. At home they are exposed to all manner of consumer technology from iPhones to iPads to Mac Books to Go Pro’s. They are demanding and discerning consumers of technology.
A visit last year to my daughter’s university hall of residence threw up an interesting insight. Whilst clean – it was the beginning of term – and habitable, the rooms weren’t about to win too many interior decorating or architectural awards. What the university had invested in was broadband cabling – an awful lot of it. Both in lectures and labs as well as back in their own rooms, today’s students have access to some highly impressive, highly enabling technology. That’s where the standard is today. That’s their level of expectation.
We have been speaking recently to a number of employers, who might be interested in the digital capabilities of their graduate intake, but openly concede that such people will have to work with clunky, outdated technology, lap tops that aren’t ready when people arrive and with an IT infrastructure with mindboggling log-in protocols. Technology which represents a sizeable backward step for such individuals and which will hardly embellish their subsequent CVs.
But if we’re looking for the ultimate unintended consequence around graduate recruitment, it may well relate to the very source of such talent – universities themselves.
A key part of our research touched on the thoughts and preparations employers had made as regards the Apprenticeship Levy. Whilst the most common response from employers embodied much ‘waiting and seeing’, others were being far more proactive. Views expressed here (and elsewhere) suggested that organisations would be taking on exponentially larger numbers of apprentices as a result of the Levy. Up to ten times their current intake in some cases.
At the same time, the Government has published recently its ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy’ paper, in which one of its key recommendations is the capacity of non-traditional or ‘challenger institutions’ to award degrees, subject clearly to them passing a high quality bar.
It is perhaps not that much of an unintended consequence to wonder about the long term viability of some higher education establishments, if up to ten times more young people are being attracted into apprenticeships and the (anticipated) likes of Google and Facebook become established as university equivalents and major rivals.
And what employer branding learnings can we take away from such research?
Very simply, that there was not one employer who did not think that graduate recruitment was not becoming more challenging, more competitive and more crowded each year.
Students are interviewing employers as much as the other way around. For the perhaps more enlightened employers, it is no longer (if it ever was) sufficient simply to broadcast graduate attraction messages. Today’s student expects a substance-rich, fluff-light message delivered often by their peers and advocates on a face to face basis, which is capable of engaging, inspiring and differentiating.
The future for campus employer brands which retain an aloof, me-too approach might not necessarily suffer the same fate as New Today, but they may share the future of some universities, constantly looking over their shoulder and wondering why they lack student appeal.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 
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