Brainfood Live On Air - Ep401 - National Interview Week - Helping 100,000 People Back to Work

0:06no yeah it's busy i mean it's part of the job really i mean people take take the mic and right you so I say, Hong, yeah, it looks like all you're doing is traveling. I'm not traveling, but I'm also promoting the fact I'm traveling because I've realized that simply being visible is critical to how I run my business. And what happens is that people see that and that's top of mind to them. And if that person happens to be a marketing person for a recruitment tech or a work tech business, that's all good for me. And then they end up reaching out. I mean, there is a correlation. I'm terrible at tracking attribution.

0:40because there's a correlation between how active I am on a place like Instagram and talking about where I am with Inbound. So it's like, yeah, I'm sorry, lads. I'm going to have to keep doing it. So if you go full digital nomad, no home base, just go around the world, that's it, like hung 10x in the space of one year? Yeah, it probably wouldn't because it would sort of take away from the newsletter stuff and the production stuff. that's really hard to do on the road because you're doing it you're basically working out of taxis and you're you know trying to do things out of airports and stuff it's not there's no way you could do proper work there so there's a limit and I've got 10 days in the US coming up and that's where I know this week prior to I've got to just jam everything in there because my productivity wise is obviously gonna gonna be exchanged for all of the networking and promotions so So there is this kind of acquisition stroke fulfillment problem I've got like everyone else has got.

1:43So yeah, big part of that party. Anyway, enough of my problems. Welcome everybody to Brain Food Live on Air, bringing it to you. Another midweek special. And it's a midweek special for a very special occasion. And it was my good friend that you can see on screen here, Michael Blakely, that reminded me of this event. So brilliant to have everyone here. I just want to make sure on audio visual you can see and hear me okay you should see myself and Michael Blakely on screen let me know in the comments if you can see us all right if you're watching this on LinkedIn by the way you should be watching this on my LinkedIn at least let me know whether the audio and visual fine over there as well I'll be interested to know whether that's actually working as planned let me just quickly check that as a matter of fact I seem to be there So, yeah, it should be all right.

2:34Okay, cool. Well, anyway, let's get on with it. Michael Blakely, you might as well introduce yourself. Who are you? What is it you do, Mike? I'm founder of Equitas, interview intelligence software, and also CEO of ScreamUp. We acquired them back end of last year. And we've got Akbar there, one of the faces of the brand, popping in and saying that he's with five-year-olds. I absolutely love that, mate. I'm going to cover it for you today, so don't worry at all. You've seen him last month on the Wreckfest recap. um as well that was a quality session and what do we do anything linked to interviews interview intelligence screen lips even got an end-to-end ats which is absolutely epic so um yeah but not about the products today something far more important to chat about um national interview week shout out to some of the guests that we've got coming on here like jen angela and shout out to all the volunteers hundreds and hundreds if not tipping a thousand at the minute and shout out to the partner who we're going to get on here next in Danny Heath from Employable who's the person that came up with this concept so I can't wait for him to talk us through the origin story before we get to the the early careers and TA folks who are going to break down what the market looks like at the minute but it's frightening I don't know if you've been tracking it hung but early careers just seems harder than ever for young folks out there trying to find jobs everywhere, not just UK, beyond.

3:57Yeah, and that is, there's sort of evidence is coming from different sources and all of this stuff. I mean, you can look at the ONS data, for instance, official statistics, and they're saying something like maybe up to a million people at the age of 16 to 24, which we categorize as young people, 16 to 24, that are not only out of education, out of work, their needs so nearly a million people um young people uh who have the energy the the wherewithal you know the the potential um but they can't connect to the to the the marketplace and overall sort of unemployment i think is about five percent uk it's 20 um at that category of 16 to 24 year So basically one in five people of that age, of which we all now know, kids, children of friends, etc., all that type of stuff.

4:56One in five basically out of work, can't find work, and also out of education. So they're literally not doing anything productive, which can be very, very demoralizing. So yeah, big problem. But you look at the process at the minute, and I'm sure a few of the guests who are seeing this like every day in and out, it's your hundreds and applications never talking to a person, number of interviews is wild. And like, okay, yes, there's a use case for AI in there. But sometimes they've over automated to the point where the experience is just terrible for these young folks. And you hear like two, three, 400 applications through to get some sort of job or even get speaking to someone, which is just even more demoralizing.

5:37It's frightening. it's a grind and and it's there's a couple of things going on i mean at the macro economic level we know that the uk and we're talking about uk specifically but i think this is probably a global problem but uk particularly has an issue because we've had essentially anemic economic growth the last three years or so um didn't the um wasn't a report just last week to say hey listen uh brilliant we've got 0.6 percent growth and everyone was cheering on that because it was like yes my god um some you know some percentage half a percent increase in the right direction not enough mate um we're not creating the jobs um and that's a real problem obviously at that macro level go ahead man the one bit of good news i saw it on the ttc channel i think it was james garter dropped it in the number of permanent places uh like roles available 45 months of decline and last month was whenever it's flatlined or like stable so is this the bottom of like the trough is it going to go back in the growth of the back of the back did i hear that right 45 months of consecutive decline of perm job openings that's desperate isn't it um and and just again i don't want to layer on the doom and gloom but i think again ons this week uh showed i think payroll was was basically down again.

6:57So number of payroll people had also decreased by about 16 ,000. So not only are more people being pushed out of work, but the job creation is not there and is hitting sort of young people as hard as anybody, if not hardest. No, no more doom and gloom. Let's get someone to inspire us on here. Get Danny on stage to tell us about what him, Employable, is doing in partnership with Equitas because honestly, this project is so close to my heart. the amount of students that we've been able to help over the last few years has been incredible and honestly the first time he pitched it to me I was just like I mean what do you need us to do help how can we support and honestly in terms of that neat figures talking to schools talking to students nobody is closer to like exactly what's going on across the board there I think Danny's got like hundreds I think the last national interview week there's like 200 plus different organization signed up to volunteer and help out so the operational lift on this project is is just wild and it's it's through the goodness of the own ta folks and recruiters jumping in and saying i'll give you half a day full day of interview and i'll inspire some students for you so danny i'm going to shut up and let you um take over and do an intro um as well because yeah this has been such an incredible project the last few years ah brilliant stuff and there he is danny heath good to see you Danny thanks for joining the show thanks for everything you're doing here as well can you quickly introduce yourself personally who are you what it is you do and then tell us a little bit more about sort of this amazing initiative that you've generated and start and start to amplify yeah of course well firstly thanks for having me on nice to see you hung and obviously always good to see you so a little brief background about myself a lot of what I tried to build around National Interview Week and the wider employable business come from lived experience.

8:49I wasn't an academic person when I was young. I was obsessed with playing school. And then I kind of just went, I guess, the wrong way, I guess, at a younger age around my priorities. And I left school at 16. And kind of, it's not a unique tale. I'm sure anyone who's a similar age to mine, mid 30s, will remember, you know, careers education was non-existent. And the advice I got was, you know, it's manual labor that's the path that you have now and you know i don't like being cold and i'm not very strong so that was an immediate red flag for me um i ended up working in a pub and you know fell into a role in in recruitment ad sales um at 17 um working for computing magazine if anyone's been been around long enough to remember that and um you know i've been very lucky to have a career across london and new york around recruitment communications and recruitment advertising and I ended up sales director of Milk Ground in the Sunday Times and it was at that point where I kind of took a step back and thought to myself what do I want to do with my career and it was around the time you know seven eight years ago where I think school even apprenticeship recruitment was starting to be put a bit more into the spotlight so a lot of my previous experience had been in the graduate recruitment space but I wanted to build a platform that really its central focus was to support schools who had no budget and students who had no support and it's not a small number I mean so many schools and such a high percentage of schools report underfunding or no funding for this so I wanted to build something that gave those guys the support they needed but then obviously also supported recruiters so the idea was to to become a bit of a bridge between education and enterprise and provide a platform that allowed upskilling of young people that people like yourselves can then hire.

10:36So that's what we've built. And I won't bore you with the top to bottom details of it, but we always have been human first. And I think that's become even more of a prominent kind of USP for us in the wake of AI's growth. We're certainly not anti-tech. We believe that the development of AI is something that can be leveraged well, but our opinion and my opinion is the bedrock of any successful business is good communication and good soft skills. It doesn't matter if you're building cars, if you're flying aeroplanes, or you're a software engineering firm, if you can't communicate what you do well internally and externally, then your business will fail.

11:12And to that end, we feel like the most at-risk skill set to young people is communication and soft skills, not just through the development of AI, but the development of society and how screen focused they are, how much they've lost the kind of human interaction that so many of us had at a young age, whether that's through socializing or through employment at a young age and etc so things like that so so we run four or five programs throughout the year and so i'll just give you an example of how we work so every year we run a program called the side hustle initiative um where we donate 30 000 pounds a year to budding entrepreneurs who have an active side hustle whilst they're in education who want to turn that into a full-fledging business when they when they leave school We usually get about 2 ,000 students supply for that.

12:01It's run as a junior Dragon's Den competition. And then the final takes place usually in central London, where we invite the top 50 entrepreneurs down to pitch their business to our Dragons. And then we kind of supply investment. We don't take any equity, but we supply investment to those businesses. And we provide all of the finalists with six months mentorship. There's about 18 businesses that exist in the UK that come through that alumni network, which we're super proud of. we run a campaign every year in partnership with JD Sports and TikTok called The Pitch where we challenge groups of teenagers to story or conceptualize and create JD Sports Christmas advert for the following year it runs a similar format to Side Hustle Initiative where the top 25 teams are then invited to TikTok headquarters where they pitch as an agency would their advertising campaign to the creative directors of TikTok JD we usually put about 200 kids into work experience in Adland a year through that program and my favorite part of that is the winning team's ad is then put in the biggest out of home billboard in Manchester for a month so they can go down and see their work come to life which they work in partnership with the JD creative team to do that.

13:09We also run a program called Future Female Leaders where we support 500 and probably going to be a lot more this year based on the application numbers but a minimum of 500 state school six form girls where we put them for a six-month leadership and training program and the concept of that is to set them into the working world with the same ambition as their male peers to try and go and kind of level out that disparity in leadership hopefully you'll kind of pick up everything we do is proactive we really struggle with with how reactive the employment market and education market is for young people so if we can arm people with the skills before we feel that's how we solve a lot of the issues so that's the kind of overview of the business all of it is supported by a tech stack which is free to use for schools which provides them with cv um cv building um crms uh online learning video learning everything that they need to have a stabilized um recruitment and and education um kind of learning program but most of our focus goes into our programs and i guess that that leads me on to national interview week which is the heartbeat of the business so this idea was born three years ago because we work with about 450 schools very closely but we work with more than that in the overall reach and I was just being hounded by them to support them to find local employers to go in and do interview training and you know we had schools in Rocksdale, Plymouth, you know Northern Ireland everywhere asking us can you get 25 50 professionals to come into our into our school and the answer was we couldn't and not at scale you know it was so much work and it was so hard to do that that I wanted to build a program that allowed anyone anywhere to support anyone else anywhere you know because that removes the issue around you know rural areas having less access it gives people from metropolitan areas more chance to engage with the wider UK community so over the last three years we've supported 20 ,000 young people with interview training and advice.

15:11And we've done that with the support of about 3 ,000 volunteers from about 600 UK-based businesses. And how it works, in essence, is you and your peers would sign up to be a volunteer. You would give up two and a half hours of your time. And within that two and a half hours, you would run five individual interview training and advice sessions on Equitas with five different students. And the idea is that you go in, most of them have never had any kind of interview experience but the idea is that you go in and within that 20 minute period you take them through three key things the first is kind of talking to them about your career your your story and understanding from them what they might want to do and what's lovely is you have such a varied mix you know I've had experiences of dealing with straight a student to you know have got a legal work experience lined up that want to go and work for link laters and know exactly what they want to do but they still need advice on how to handle those steps and then I've worked with people that really think they have nothing to offer society that feel like they're destined to be unemployed and there's one story I'll share that there was a young woman this year that I was speaking to she lived in a single parent household her mum worked three jobs she had two younger sisters and she felt like she had no transferable skills or nothing to offer society when in actual fact you know four nights of the week after school she was looking after her younger siblings she was feeding them during bedtime she was basically a caregiver to them in in in support her mum and I helped her understand the transferable skills of that alone are so strong and so important for her to move forward and it really shaped her viewpoint of how she looked at the world and that's the opportunity we have to support these young people through this program now the development of the campaign and the program has shifted this year um I was at a BHI event in parliament a couple of months ago announcing our pledge to support 100 ,000 young people through this program over the next five years.

17:04And how we're doing that and how it's slightly developed is we were often being asked by schools and employers to provide a more kind of nuanced version of this, which was industry-focused. So what we're delivering over the course of the next 12 months, starting in October, is seven national interview events throughout the year. Six of them are industry-focused, So they're actually named National Interview Industry Editions. The first one is engineering and construction. And what happens within that event is we match 1 ,500 young people who have a vested interest in working in engineering or construction with professionals exclusively from that industry.

17:45So the idea is the interview practice and the careers advice becomes much more centered. it allows people who want to work in a specific industry but don't have a family member or someone in their personal network it gives them a chance to understand more about what part of that industry might be right for them and then in February as well we have our national interview week main event where we'll be supporting 10 ,000 young people for that as well so the last thing I would say about the program we also run a very kind of detailed career survey throughout it so So every student who applies to secure their place, they take a 40 question career survey with us for us to better understand them, but also for us to better understand the landscape of young people across the country.

18:31Last year, we had 13 ,000 young people complete that survey. So we have a really rich idea of why young people want to work for certain companies. What's most important to them? What are the marketing messages you need to be talking to them about? And then we also publish an annual CSR report, which identifies the work readiness of young people. So through every interview that is done with a volunteer, every student is then sent a personal impact report to them, their parents and their teacher, which grades them across key competencies based across the skills building program, which allows young people to kind of take something away from that to self-improve.

19:06and then we collate that score in and give people an idea around, you know, what is the state of young people in the UK? Are they struggling most with talking, listening, understanding projects? So that's all available and shareable as well with our volunteers. So hopefully that kind of tied everything up and it all made sense. Michael, I'm not sure if I missed anything. You're obviously such a key part of this with Equitas that anything you want to add, please feel free. at least there's a bit of light there and all the doom and gloom that me and hung have been chatting about so incredible folks hung has dropped in so many links there as well like check them out we'll fire all of this through you via email afterwards as well probably more important to get to the folks who've helped and supported us and jen get angela on there colin as well and it'll be brilliant just to hear what's happening and with them because they're there thinking how the hell do we hire the the next generation of folks coming through with all the noise in the market and what they're saying so yeah thanks for the intro danny like i think you've covered it perfectly thank you yeah brilliant stuff danny i've got to say i understand very well sort of you're talking about communication skills i think you absolutely leveled up in terms of what the communication skills were there's a brilliant monologue really filled in all of the gaps in my knowledge there and also i think your your background in and in ads also kind of showed as well with some of the creative sort of initiatives that you've been pushing out so fabulous stuff um but yeah let's get talking with within group and we'll get angela and colin and jen on now uh let me see if i'm filled with this um so okay i'm going to move everyone to gallery uh people who are being invited to gallery by the way um can you just make sure that your mic and your camera are on i think you've got to fiddle with a few things there it's not sort of defaulting onto it.

20:54So you've got to just make sure that's messed around with. So once I see you on gallery there and here, and I'll bring you on. There we go. Let's see if I can bring Jen on. There we go. Jen's on here. Hello, Jen. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good, good. Why don't you quickly introduce yourself? Jen, who are you? What it is you do? Yeah, sure. So I'm Jen Hume. I'm head of talent acquisition at BPP, which is a private university. and I also run our graduate recruitment outplay service so looking at our graduates from university and trying to place them into clients so I'm speaking to clients day to day about their graduate landscape which is very very interesting but yeah that is me in a nutshell.

21:38Fantastic stuff and we have Angela here as well. Angela why don't you quickly introduce yourself, what it is you do? Sure, no problem. So I am Angela Renfrew. I am Director of Talent Acquisition and Early Careers at First Bus. So operating across UK and Ireland from kind of Aberdeen down to Plymouth. And we offer a variety of entryways across apprentices and grads, but also actually a lot of our roles appeal to younger people as well. yeah fantastic um i've just shared jen and um angela's linkedin in the chat stream make sure you connect with those two folks we have colin here as well colin great to see you can you quickly introduce yourself who you what it is you do yeah how you doing hung um i'm the ceo of frs co-op in in ireland but uh probably what i'm here to talk about most is our our business employability business tourist news so we run the largest employability contract in ireland and we we've had about 60 ,000 young people through our program over the last sort of few years.

22:42So we can give you some insights into what's happening here in Ireland over, you know, 10 years ago, we were sort of where you guys were in terms of youth unemployment. And we're probably at least half of where you are. So a lot to do with the economy, but lots of other stuff as well. Fabulous stuff. We've got a bonus guest as well. Aisha's coming on here. Aisha sorry can you yes she's she's managed to do the uh there's the initial test which is to get the camera on um Aisha great to see you uh can you quickly introduce yourself who you what it is you do yes hi everyone I'm Aisha Laseko and I'm founder of direct and director of 2040 leaders and we're a social enterprise that supports companies after they've hired young people so we can really support them with their performance and retention because we believe and we all know that relationships drive results and the most important relationship that you can hold as someone early in your career is with your manager but we often leave that to chance and that's something that I help companies not do.

23:42Yeah brilliant and great to see you here Aisha, fantastic stuff. So we've had the lay of the land, it's extremely challenging for young people entering the job market. I mean I count my blessings to be honest, I entered the job market probably I would say neat ready. I would say I was more or less that type of person. So no understanding what career path, no real network, no uncle to say, hey, listen, here's an internship, you know, as I literally no clue, applying away from remote getting rejected from absolutely everything. And then my world was shrinking, the more rejections I was getting. And to the point where my response to those rejections was simply to lower my standards.

24:28I accepted the rejection as a verdict of my capability and then thought, all right, I just got to look lower. And I kept on getting lower and lower until eventually I was just applying for basic clerical work, despite the fact I'd graduated from university. And even then I was getting rejected, this time for being quote, quote, overqualified. And it was only until someone actually interceded, it was one of the people who rejected me, interceded and actually sought me out to say, why are you applying for this job do you not realize and that started a different train of thought similar to your example danny about that young young lady uh who's looking after her siblings just didn't know like literally her world was this couldn't frame it in a different way needed someone's intervention to show them a different path so it's very very important that person if you're that person and you encounter young people of this in this way you make that intercession.

25:22Like don't wait for someone else to do it. You've got to give them a reframe. Anyway, it's worse for them than it is. Today, it's worse now than it was for me then. Because there's a genuine case where the volume of opportunities is far less, the volume of competition is far higher. Michael, you shared a link just in the chat about the apprenticeship competition. Lots more people not going to university due to cost and the three, four year commitment, et cetera, surging demand now for apprenticeships. And again, the competition shifted there. So it's tough macro and it's tough micro as well. Okay.

25:58Let's go to you, Jen, on your side. You're an early careers hirer. Firstly, can you confirm what the state of play is? Is it the case that the demand for young people has gone down somewhat in the sense that companies are not aggressively hiring and scaling as they were in the past? Is that a reality? the situation? Yeah, absolutely. I think what I'm seeing is not necessarily that there isn't a need. I think there is definitely a reservation around AI, AI replacing entry level roles and all that sort of talk and everyone's sort of playing out how it goes. So what I'm hearing from clients are we've cancelled our grad scheme this year or our grad scheme looks very different.

26:40We're not doing a rotation. We've cancelled our apprenticeship scheme, anything early careers. Now that doesn't necessarily mean they're not hiring roles that could be suitable for graduates but how on earth a graduate is going to find them if there's some weird and wonderful job title um so when you delve a little deeper when you're talking to people it's like well what roles have you got that and you gave your example hung up going for an entry role but there are good quality roles out there for graduates but if you're a graduate searching for them and you don't know what to look for like they're really really difficult to find um which is what I've had a lot of conversations about and so definitely definitely a reduction in graduate positions but also the the good stuff that gets you graduate positions such as work experience internships everything just massively being scaled back so these graduates they don't know where to start they don't know what they're looking for yeah and as the bar raises the employer expectation increases from what they want from every type of person including graduates so the people that have kind of already a built-in advantage are able to to demonstrate those experiences if i could step into the world of work at age of 21 with four internships with the goldman sachs with mckinsey's with whoever it is of course i'm the premium rate candidate and i'm going to get that job but i probably got there through you know my connections or my father's connections or wherever it is so there's there's kind of a real danger that we create sort of uh so reinforcing elitism there which is no good for society and no good for anybody so what do we do about this Angela any thoughts?

28:16I mean I guess for me so we operate quite a large apprenticeship scheme within First Bus and the reason why I was so keen on working with Danny and we quite often put the world to rights when we catch it up but for me I'm kind of similar to you so it's thinking back to my experience my memory does go back that far and the advice that you're given at school and how limited that is and that that's not a a kind of negative towards people that work in education they're overworked and under resourced as well so it's trying to wear many hats for me it's how we bring that that value add to people starting to look and consider this now to stop them becoming a statistic so for me whether it's entry-level roles, whether it's apprenticeships, whether it's graduate schemes, it's going out and really showcasing what that looks like and also providing the support to enable them to start to consider that as an option.

29:12When, as we say, you know, your world has shrunk kind of since COVID and financial challenges that business faces now, you're no longer looking to lots of people for exposure to what opportunities are. Your visibility now is much more limited and for me it's how can we make that really quality ad because you know for me I'm pure recruitment background but it's about setting people up for success and for me I have a real problem when people look at early careers as just a hire it's not just a hire it's going back to what Aisha was saying at the beginning you know it's it's how you set people up for success and how you continue that that kind of nurturing development path for them.

29:53yeah brilliant and i guess we need sort of us in the recruitment profession to just you know not wait for a solution outside we've got to take action even if it's on our own initiative and we've got to kind of get together in group as as danny's tried to put together um and you know i think we each encourage each other to go ahead and do something about it which is uh which is what we need to do uh colin donnery you're coming from a different country you've had some experience on the path there. Can you share a little bit about what you were doing there and how it might apply to the challenge you see in the UK?

30:27So the first thing I'd say to you in the UK, this isn't going to end soon, okay? So this is going to carry on probably for another 18 months, two years. So it sort of is what it is at the moment. You know, I think economy-wise in Ireland, so look, we probably after the 2008-2009 recession had the worst recession in the world. our unemployment rates jumped from zero unemployment to almost 20 % and youth unemployment to 33%. So what the government did here at the time, so the key thing is, look, there's not a lot you can do at scale without the economy coming back. That's just what sort of happens in this scenario.

31:09What the government did here at the time, they created, I suppose, the opportunity for organizations like us to exist who supported unemployed people. We get people through the door when they're a year unemployed. And so just we have a huge amount of data on what that looks like. So we created a proprietary assessment with the University of Sheffield Hallam. And every single person that comes to us, they come to us for a year. We do four assessments a year. We've done 750 ,000 assessments. So the key things we look, we measure across our, the first one is confidence, right? So very difficult to move yourself into a job without confidence.

31:51And then underneath that, skills, health, mental health, care, transport, et cetera, right? So, and young people are really interesting. They don't actually work in the same way as, and to your point, Hung, when you were going for that early career job, right, you're getting battered, your confidence is dropping. And the big problem we have is we don't deal with this straight up. These people fall into that long-term unemployment cycle, regardless of how well-educated they are. And sometimes it can affect, I suppose, people who are better educated worse. And I think to Danny's point, that can happen.

32:31I think the key thing we see with young people is two things. Peer learning is really, really important. If you can get them into employers as the government, when they build programs, where they're going in groups, really, really important to keep them engaged. But work experience is absolutely critical. I think, in fairness, the Welsh government are coming out with a new program. It'll probably kick off next March or April, have really identified this as, you know, that getting people into some type of job, It can be paid. It needs to be paid. Right. And it needs to be supported by government.

33:10You're probably going to see that a lot more in England where they will underpin jobs and they will effectively pay employers to hire people at early careers. That's going to happen much more. You look at the countries that do this stuff really well. Germany, Austria, you know, they get people in practically and that sort of thing. I think one of the interesting things, and from an employer and a young person perspective, the back to the office, back to the site is a really, really good thing to look at. Employers want people back in the office. Young people want to be back in the office. You know what I mean?

33:46So that's probably the number one thing young people have in terms of attractiveness to employers. You know what I mean? They're happy to go into the office. They want to build along with the culture and grow their careers. So I think what we see, look, we've placed 75 ,000 people into jobs in Ireland. About 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 of them are under 25. Really great to hear the work Danny is doing with Michael. I think the work we do is probably before the interview. We do work on interviews, but there's a huge amount of work. The longer young people are out of employment, the more you have to support them so they don't drift into that long term.

34:27um unemployed cycle you know yeah that's a really really important point because it is a it's a whirlpool it can just whirl you down and then it's hard to swim out of you've got to just stop people from getting in there and i'm i'm probably an extremist in the sense i think an intervention is required like literally you can't just let people say sort it out you've got to come in and take charge um so asia let's bring it to you uh you're dealing with these young people after they've got an opportunity I guess the next crisis point might be you know they've got to succeed in that sort of first chance something you imagine someone who's just trying so hard to get that job opportunity they get that opportunity finally and then suddenly it's not worked out for them and they're on the market again after five weeks that's no good for anybody's sort of psychology how do you make sure that doesn't happen um this is probably one of the things that is the most disheartening about this whole process because we've got all of us on this call so committed to trying to ensure young people get their first job but we completely forget that the real work actually starts after day one and if we're talking about young people who are at the most risk of being neat they are the ones that are likely to have the least experience of the workplace so when they get their first job they don't know how work works I've got a son currently in his second internship who still calls me every day asking me certain questions still is asking me things that his manager should have explained to him and he's lucky that I feel very lucky that I can do that for him but my work is also ensuring that we can do that at scale for as many young people as possible and the thing is when it comes to the role of the manager we all know that we are not training managers to have the capability that they need in general, let alone training managers who are able to support young people and who are able to support young people who are from backgrounds who are very different to their own.

36:33The generational gap in and of itself is causing friction but of course there's so much difference in the workplace at the moment and we need people who are able to understand young people and really equip them. It is not just all about how do we give young people that information it's how do we give managers that information and how they can work together because we all have all quit a job because of our manager right we've all stayed at a job because of our manager and so it's really about thinking about this through more of that system lens what are all the things that wrap around a young person what is the information that they need how clear are we about the expectations that we hold for those young people and ultimately do we understand how that young person needs to work and how they navigate the workplace and do we understand as a manager how we also work so that we can help to find that common ground for young people because they want to do well um but often you know we talk about why do some people why do we not want to hire young people is it ai etc i don't think we talk enough about the fact that some of us don't really want to hire young people because i think they're difficult but the reality is is that we just need to take more time to understand rather than just assuming that the problems that exist in the workplace with young people is a young person problem it's often the system that we create around them.

37:55There's an education piece for the employers as well and all of you on the call are bought into it that investing that time is a bit longer but the last time a crash happened or there's a slowdown as fast as this in 08, 09, everyone pulled back graduate, early careers. And then the data from the ISE, the Institute of Student Employers came through and it was five or six graders. They're like, oh shit, we've got a massive internal leadership gap and we're having to spend double on recruiting folks in from absolutely everywhere else who actually kept hiring at a pace and training them. And it's like the MDC time was wild for that because they didn't invest in early careers at the right time.

38:32So it's hard to know how to convince the C-suite whenever they're looking, like one quarter ahead at results and you're saying to them this is a five six year play to get the right talent in early it's how do you do it across the board because i don't know i've never had to sit and sell that idea to them a lot of the time so i'll go because i guess it's it's quite a relevant topic for me at the minute um so one of the the programs we run is a engineering apprentice so um and i guess you know when you're sitting in a business there's always a commercial aspect so our apprentices in the areas have to be baked into headcount to make sure that they they make budget and often

39:17have we lost angela i think we have left us on a cliffhanger we did quite a large piece of work where we looked at and look we know we know engineering is a as a skill shortage that lots of countries are dealing with but we looked into data so the first thing we did is we looked at our population at work in our engineering teams and we started to show what that looked like from an aging demographic and what does that look like three years out what does that look like five years out what does it look like 10 years out and for me we're early careers it comes back to everything it's building the workforce of the future so if we know we have an issue here here's the answer and here's the data to back it up and we've got much more buy-in with regards to looking at that because typically in that engineering space your attrition's quite low but it is you know if you're if you're looking at people that are hitting kind of that 60s mid 60s what what do we have coming up throughout the pipeline to balance that out and again it's it was one of the points that I am Aisha raised as well it's how do you change that culture of working with people at that age entering the world of work for the first time all right i want to just um underline something angela said really important there population modeling folks like model your employee your workforce demographics um because the c-level ain't going to see that like particularly if you've got a stable function a stable department you don't need to do a lot of recruitment all the people are there 15 20 years almost you forget about them because this they're they're a functional sort of group of people.

40:51But what happens when there's that retirement cliff? Because it's going to happen. Or, you know, key people start dropping away. Where's your future pipeline? You do not model and modeling, I think, just creates a new language you can bring to the C-level. Because I agree with you, Michael. I think sort of everyone on screen here from an ethics point of view, from a motivation point of view is all aligned. But the incentives are pressuring against us, right? because basically every CEO is saying, do more or less. We need immediacy of return, immediacy of value. Very difficult for that to translate necessarily into a young person.

41:29That might take a little while to ramp up or any new hire coming in to ramp up. So we've got to try and find a way to align those incentives. Jen Hume, how have you gone about doing that? Because I guess you've got to defend your space in your business as well, don't you? How do you make the case for early careers hiring? Is that something that you can, have you got any sort of techniques you can share there for us? Yeah, I've got it relatively easy because I work for a university. So you can go to the powers above and they do believe in investing in young people, which is also good. But to your point, we're looking at, you know, if you come at any business, they want to see results straight away.

42:10So it's what quick wins can you find? um so we had I had a look and to Angela's point that use data data is your friend so I had a look at um how many temps we were getting in the business massive temp spend we had peak season and I was like hold on like good positions I was like that could be a graduate internship there so let's stop investing in this let's stop paying a massive margin for terms and let's just repackage visas grad internships exactly the same output quick win for the business we actually saved the money um and we ended up placing six of our own students as well into graduate positions so it's not going to be like not not everybody is going to have the same opinion of okay let's let's invest now for in 10 years time when we're going to be a bit screwed because we don't have any any leaders and management but what quick wins can you have and when you start tilting that seesaw a little bit you can get more and more wins so it's really looking for those opportunities yeah i love that basically look at where you're spending and if you've got some sort of seasonality and what you're doing i i guess a lot of employers might just be locked into if you're like the the classic graduate seasonal cycle say oh we and we do a graduate scheme here we hire you onboard everyone on september whatever it is then we forget about it actually no there's lots of people out there can work anytime start anytime uh we've got a million people out there um so rather than just go immediately to a temp agency think about whether you can put something in the university and get those people in at that point.

43:39Any other ideas? Danny, go ahead. Yeah, Jed, I just wanted to, you're very, I think, well positioned to answer a follow-up question based on something you said about future planning. Now, I look at the upcoming, I think, inevitable change in higher education quite interestingly. I think even if you look at university acceptance data this year, it was somewhat of a false flag because the headlines were record number of acceptance but actually the percentage of people in that age group went down who wanted to go to university right and i everything i'm reading and everything i understand through the ecosystem financially of universities is it's bad news bears right that there's a lot of universities that are struggling to stay afloat i think there's a lot of forecasts that some universities might either close down or merge and i think what what we'll see with that from a kind of common sense landscape is it won't be the red bricks and established universities that suffer it will be effectively the more working class universities, right?

44:36So if that happens, which we think it will, how are universities kind of going to survive and adapt? Because what we're, I think, inevitably going to see from young people is then going, well, I can't get into these red brick unis. I now maybe have less option in terms of the universities that will accept me. And then on top of that, I can apply for a degree apprenticeship, earn 80 grand over the four years and have a degree, not come out with the debt of a student loan and it does feel like every metric is saying that school lever and apprenticeship recruitment is going to grow and graduate recruitment is going to drop is that something that as a university you you would challenge or do you feel that is absolutely what's going to happen and if so how what's the long-term plan to adapt to it I definitely think it's it's happening already so BPP just to give the background we're private university we're a apprenticeship provider as well so I can see both sides of the scale of that one going up and and universities going down in certain extent but I think people need to be more aware of like what what they're looking to get out of university I went out to university to hold my hands up because I thought I had to because I went to private school and because I was being pushed into all the red brick ones of what what I had to do and that was that was my path but I never really thought about like why what am I looking to do when I get out of that so I went to a red brick university I did maths really academic subject and then I was like looking back I was so green I had no clue what to do I was there I just was like well I'm smart so someone will hire me like I hadn't thought until I graduated like how am I going to make myself ready for the workplace so what I'm seeing in the university landscape try not to sell BPP here too much but um so we're doing a lot of new courses but we're all about employability so rather than just focusing on academic studies so we've just launched a new course called cert he which is basically make yourself employable in 10 months um and you can learn um about finance you learn about law but you also learn about really really basic um what we think is basic like workplace readiness skills so how to write your cv how to do an interview how to professionally send an email um a little bit more about like the corporate world and how that works um and i think that is what universities need to do they need to pivot um so i spent last week on reddit talking to students getting their a-level results um especially ones going through clearing and what their options are and i was asking students about this i was like what do you what do you think graduate graduate employers are looking for from you and they were like oh i don't know and i was like well we need to educate them and this maybe is goes back to school and they need to be thinking about this when they're thinking about their futures not just doing what their parents want to do that's great yeah like Okay.

47:18Just the sort of counterpoint to that, Jen, I think is employers need to look at the people coming through the system aren't vanilla, right? So it's, you're not getting like, I started this social experiment 27 years ago when I had my first child. Now I've six between 21 and 27. So literally I am sort of a case study on how this works. I cashed, I bet all my chips on the creative world from my six children and didn't force them down the accountancy or, you know, the really good sort of stuff. And I think, joking aside, employers really need to look at this, you know. You know, the way, look, my kids don't talk.

48:05I don't know whether you have kids and you call them now and, you know, they send your voice note back. They don't take a call. you know they communicate in different ways all this sort of stuff we have probably managers interviewing them like me old and gray in their in their in their late 40s and early 50s not understanding why they're doing this what you know what i mean so i think there's an edgy like from our side in ireland when when we started tourist new like and we got a job on you know we got a vacancy and we're like wow you know it's great and then we'd put someone in a job and they'd fall out within two months a bit like you were talking about earlier and then we realized we've of start challenging employers to sort of go what are you going to do for this person when they land how are you going to onboard them how are you going to keep them how are you building a career for them you know what i mean so i think that that's the big danger in the sort of the uk at the moment in that it becomes so competitive that you know employers just look don't look beyond the sort of the the first degree or the 2.1 and you know really don't look at the person and lose out on on much more rounded you know um creative people which is obviously going to be much more important in in the ai world we live in or in the coming years you know can i just jump in there there's so many things that everyone said that i completely agree with um i think the first thing about how do we continue to encourage employers to employ young people we often go to data which is super important but some of the things that i've seen that are really effective is also story and contact.

49:39When you can get senior leaders to actually meet these young people who are neat, which let's be honest, we have a perception of who these neat young people are. They're highly capable, talented, ambitious young people who just don't have opportunity. And when we can get senior leaders to truly connect with these young people and see the potential that has been left on the table, that's when I've seen the most movement. I've seen companies say, okay, yeah, we'll do this for our CSR but we don't want to hire anyone say actually no we want this to be our next hiring pipeline we need more of that in our business so that's where I think we really need to capitalize on because there are so many people in companies who got their first break through getting a work experience program or an internship program and now they are the director CEO etc so we should really try to capitalize on that.

50:29I think when it comes to the point that Colin made about the people who are actually interviewing young people, luckily when you actually get people in a room and you ask what are you looking for, they will very rarely ever say I'm looking for a degree. They will say I'm looking for someone who is hardworking, who is willing to learn, who is resilient who is a good people person and so I think that's another thing we need to do more of give managers that that time and space the training the capability to actually understand what they're looking for so they can better recognize it in young people coming in and then from a two-pronged approach we also need to help young people um recognize that their skills that come from their life not just their education not just their work experience is equally as valid And in my opinion, I would say a little bit more relevant because somebody who has had to develop certain life skills to survive in life that are relevant and transferable, that makes that that those skills become more of that person's essence.

51:35It's just who they are and they show up to work every day and use that. So we need to help young people be better at recognising those skills within themselves and that they're valuable and how to talk about them more. and on the flip side helping managers recognise that those skills are equally important because if you say to somebody from a much more privileged background this young person is the eldest sibling and looks after their family members and translates documents for their parent who doesn't speak English it doesn't mean that much you have to explain what that really means that's leadership that's responsibility that's you know so so many different skills so I think that's a really important point and then my final point on this monologue is um I really am happy to hear what Jen's saying about the employability work you do because often when I hear people talk about employability they will end up we're helping people to write their CV and look for a job we need to really move past that because young people are struggling when they get to work they don't know what to do our employability work should include how do you send emails how do you understand your manager what is the way to have visibility how do you speak up in a meeting those are the the areas in which young people are really struggling with once they get to work and so the more we can think beyond that interview and offer letter the more we're going to actually equip young people for success and it means that businesses once they get those young people are going to see that it's a worthwhile return on investment because businesses are looking at the short term we need to make sure that when those young people are in that the the the impact um is positive not that they're having these negative experiences because young people don't know the basics yeah and i just a quick follow-up on that and just something for i guess the audience if you're sitting there thinking you know this all sounds great practically how do i do more of this like the the absolute thing i would implore you to do based on our relationship with schools and again going back to all of the data is the absolute best way to do all of this is to run a work experience program like there is no alternative that comes close to being able to invest the time to get 25 50 100 whatever the number is that you can of local kids from local schools into your buildings like the stark reality is less than 35 percent of kids in the uk will do work experience this year and i shudder to think what that percentage looks like when you when you add in the nepotism around it and what that looks like for underprivileged kids like there is no remedy better than having boots on the ground to learn your building to learn the skills like everything that we've spoken about can be singularly placed into work experience like that is the silver bullet and look I appreciate some industries can't do it right some you know if you're in a factory or or you're in defense there's limitations but the fact is most businesses don't have the limitations And what it does do outside of the creation of opportunity for those 25, 50, 100 people is the peer to peer kind of impact that has on your brand is really undeniable.

54:46So, yeah, it's an investment and yet it's an investment of time. But if you're looking to do more as an organization, that is that is how you do it. That is the silver bullet. It's not complicated. We've just stopped doing it as a nation. That's truly all that's happened. It was so much more prominent 10 years ago. and we've decided to stop and it impacts young people it impacts your brand and it just you know that would that that's I think the biggest way to wrap it around in my opinion I don't know if anyone disagrees with that I don't I completely agree with what you're saying and I think for me one of the things that makes me really nervous nowadays about hearing how businesses are trying to switch to virtual work experience for me that just doesn't work well like what does that even look like for someone that's wanting work experience to understand what it looks like in of day-to-day basis how to connect with people how he reads people so kind of all those transferable skills that Aisha was saying and the stuff that we really need to prepare people for when they're entered in the workplace for me I just don't get how that works in a virtual world for me it has to be bringing them into the embrace of the actual working environment and show them what that looks like.

55:53I agree I think there are two things right the virtual work experience is a long-form job advert where you understand more about the business and the people inside it it's you don't get the communication and the soft skills that's the primary objective i think for work experience so i i do think it has a place but i think it's mis-termed as work experience i agree uses the wrong name in my opinion but it's just it's worrying that that's where some businesses are going to now in their thinking oh hung you're on mute I'm here on mute we can't hear you mate I tell you what I'm doing on this 400 odd episodes still haven't got a fucking clue but there we go alright you just grabbed that we'll take the expletive off don't worry alright the National Interview Week let's bring this back to the beginning of what the campaign is because I'm still unclear as to what the call to action is Danny so National interview week this is brilliant um but how do recruiters get involved what's the message that needs to happen and what's what do we want to see occur as an outcome from this uh from this campaign can you give us a breakdown on that yeah i mean truly the call to action is is to for people to volunteer there and their peers time to to take part in the interviews um you know i said at the start of the show with with support it's 20 000 young people in three years we've had over 50 000 applications so every time we run a program we have to let two-thirds of the accepted number down I mean to give you context we opened up our autumn and winter program the week before the school term ended in July we have about 7 ,000 places for those three events and we're at 17 ,000 applicants already before schools come back so we're never going to be able to have enough volunteers to support the need but the more volunteers we get the more of the need we can fulfill so if if you're listening to this and you think your organization would like to take part um you know connect with me you know go to our website that we can take you through the program but it really is about time and and the ability to you know it's virtual so it is at your desk you don't need to leave it's you can pick a variety of dates and times to take part um we think we've made it as easy as possible with the help of the equitatis technology so it does allow we think it allows people with a recruitment experience but it's not dedicated to recruitment experience but if you have got a recruitment experience if you want to utilize your skill set in a volunteering way we feel like this is is essentially the best way to do it so the call to action is yeah we're asking you for your time to to help support young people that's that's it and danny like on top of that there's even folks who jump on meet someone and be like we have to give this young person work experience or an apprenticeship or whatever and like there's been a handful a few dozen of folks that have come through and that like people have got jobs off the back of this which is incredible but we can't do it without the help of the volunteers there and like you hear the feedback from the students it's unbelievable they're like i think i could face my next interview, I'm like 100 % more confident than I was in the past.

59:08And even on the employer side, how do they reach those folks? Normally, they're not going school to school doing work experience workshops or anything like that. So it gets the brand out there in a positive way from folks just chatting about what their background and experience was. So it's one of the most incredible projects like we've ever seen. And like, yeah, we support on the tech side and help out there. But Danny and the team doing operations, such a massive lift to get so many volunteers so many businesses involved so the links in the chat there folks jump in as a volunteer if you want to find out how you can help further as well me and danny happy to jump on calls chats tell you about everything we're doing around it it's yeah such a good program a few people on here got involved this year as well angela's just signed up jen you and the team have done a ton of interviews already and seen it firsthand so yeah there's some inspiring kids on there yeah i'm gonna sign up myself guys i'm gonna do it um and i reckon everyone should i've got to be honest i don't see how you can't donate what three hours four hours of your time in a year and you could have a disproportionate impact on the lives of those young people like the interceptions that you know danny you mentioned that young lady whoever that unknown person was that gave me that additional feedback that they didn't have to give they just reached out separately from the rejection and said listen i need to have this i need to communicate this to that can make a huge impact you just don't know sort of what that can do for somebody so please donate your time your recruitment expert apply that time uh to these young people and see what you can do um all right i want to be promoting that link i would encourage everyone to sign up and i encourage everyone to re-promote that after sign up i think it's a wonderful project and it's one of these where you just got to get involved um because you can't sit there passively uh and just do scroll your way through Twitter and think that's contributing to society because it ain't.

1:01:00All right, that's it. We've got to come off air because we've finished. We've hit our time of the hour. So thank you everyone for joining. I hope you've enjoyed the show and learned a huge amount. I certainly have. Just want to thank all of our wonderful panelists for joining the show. Jen Hume, Colin Donnery, Aisha Lisey-Eko. Is that how I pronounce it? I hope I haven't messed that up. I probably have, you know, next time you see me, just give me a clip around here all. And Angela Renfrew, brilliant to have you on the show. Danny Heath, thank you so much for your amazing leadership on this project.

1:01:35Michael Blakely, brilliant to have you on Core Pilot on the show, man. Thanks for insisting that this was a topic very well worthwhile. All right, that's it, folks. We'll leave it there. Have a good afternoon. We'll see you soon. See you soon. Cheers. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.