A group of university students is clustered around a huge blue laminated board. In the centre of the board stands a giant inflatable dice which, in a few minutes, will be rolled and play will begin.
This is The Accumulators and it’s not just a board game. It’s an innovative recruitment scheme set up by global financial services firm Morgan Stanley, one of the City’s leading players, to give final-year university students in the UK and Europe a sense of what investment banking really involves. And it’s aimed squarely at students who have not chosen finance as a degree subject.
By the time the game ends, it’s possible that some of these young men and women will have made some very important career decisions – choices that may go on to affect the rest of their lives.
“It’s an educational tool, a board game that shows student from non-finance backgrounds what we do here at Morgan Stanley in a fun way,”
explains Jo Scott, Morgan Stanley’s head of campus recruitment for Europe.
“The game leads them via the leading global financial centres into different areas of finance, e.g. interest rates or mergers and acquisitions. We want to attract people from as diverse a group as possible. We already have some very strong candidates working for us who did not choose finance at uni – we don’t exclude anyone on the basis of their degree subject.”
Schemes like the Accumulators might be a more extreme example of the methods being used to lure the brightest and best graduates into the City. But graduate recruitment is changing. For the City, the ethos of simply cherry-picking the best students from Oxbridge no longer applies, given the need for an increasingly diverse workforce, coupled with current high vacancy rates. And milk-round corporate Power Point presentations are now so numerous – an average of 30 big employers will target a single university at the start of the final university year – that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the corporate message across to potential candidates.
“Students are inundated with information,”
says Katherine Hogbin, director of Origin HR, a leading City graduate & HR outsourcing company, part of Joslin Rowe/Blomfield group. “Anything that is a bit different or unusual is likely to attract more attention.”
Hogbin says that City recruiters are increasingly using different ideas to attract good graduates because of the long-held perceptions about the City’s elitism.
“There’s a lot of press around investment banking and people still think they only hire an elite group. Where women are concerned, for instance, that makes it even harder – because not enough women apply in the first place. So what they are trying to do is make the presentations more interesting; more real.”
Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) understand this as the sponsors of a graduate recruitment and work placement online site called Ragtime, which describes itself as being “about unsigned music and graduate jobs”
. Students can vote online for their favourite up and coming bands and choose which gigs to attend.
“PwC gets it name out there – and the turnout at the gigs produce a diverse group of students,”
says Hogbin.
“It’s a more interesting way of attracting people and getting the corporate name out on campus than a standard presentation.”
Mike Hill, CEO of Graduate Prospects, the not-for-profit graduate careers advisory service, says that the financial sector has modified its approach to graduate recruitment, because the world has dramatically changed.
“We live in a global economy. So people who can speak less-traditional languages – Urdu or Mandarin for instance – are now highly sought after. Those are not really skills you’d associated with an Oxbridge background.”
“Employers want people with a work ethic and practicality. One graduate recruiter recently told me he was hungry for someone with a third who can sell, rather than someone with a first from Oxbridge who only knows the theory of selling.”
Terence Perrin, director of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, says that the impetus towards expanding the talent pool has developed as the city itself has grown globally.
“When you look at the number of players there are in the City and the number of graduate recruitment schemes, you’re competing for a small pool of talent if you’re only looking at Oxbridge. There are 130 UK universities,”
he says.
The core problem for City recruiters is there is also a very fixed idea about what it’s like to work there. Many of the brighter students the City would like to attract are extremely cynical about the business world.
“Student polls show negative perceptions, such as the length of working hours, for instance,”
explains Perrin.
“So part of the marketing is about showing that the City has more to offer than working in corporate finance or being a trader or researcher. There are a lot of opportunities in the IT and within risk or marketing; within infrastructure roles as well as traditional ones.”
Perrin says that as a consequence of this, recruiters are looking to extend their reach.
“If you are looking for IT people, for example, rather than targeting the top 20 universities to get those people, you might be better off looking at the most highly-rated IT courses in the UK.
“It’s a case of looking at the specific places where the best people might be studying rather than taking the ‘one size fits all’ perspective of only considering the better universities. And those graduates will then go report back to their friends on campus, who might also not fit the stereotypical position. It’s myth busting, if you like. And the more we ca do that, the better.”
Mark Blythe is director of GTI specialist publishers and a leading provider of graduate careers events. Seven years ago he set up Capital Chances, a series of recruitment events and programmes aimed at diverse graduate groups; they are sponsored by a number of leading City names including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and HSBC.
“The more perceptive City recruiters realise that if you are trying to recruit to an under-represented group, those people that aren’t applying to you for a job – because you are a bank – won’t come to an event when you market as yourself. But in a situation like Capital Chances, we go out and market the event as an experience to a broad range of target students. If it was just an event for, say, JP Morgan or Deutche Bank, they’d be less likely to come.”
Blythe says that as graduate recruitment events proliferate on campus, it dilutes the experience. “The focus has to be that events really work and deliver results, i.e. graduates going on the internships and ultimately being hired.”
So what does the future hold for graduate recruitment? Katherine Hogbin believes that the current situation where employers trawl round campuses with presentations and recruitment gimmicks could become redundant.
“It’s much easier to mass mailshot online, say a whole year group or a specific group of maths students, and just send them the information.
“I’ve seen an interactive Online Student Assessment Centre where a student can be interviewed by a lady on screen, giving the candidate certain scenarios to tick.”
“It’s certainly moving towards online. All our clients post all their vacancies online – some receive hundreds of applications in a day.”