Leveraging early careers talent across EMEA: key takeaways from AMS & Talint partners roundtable

The highlight of my month came last week when I teamed up with Jamie Pirie, AMS Client Solutions Director, and Debra Sparshot, Talent Industry Expert & Analyst from TALiNT Partners, to host a virtual roundtable focusing on the most important topics for early career leaders and organisations across EMEA. It was a great chance to step away from the day-to-day and share insights on key considerations for 2024 when hiring and nurturing early talent. 

The roundtable attendees were a fantastic blend of TA professionals, some with highly strategic, well established early career programmes and others at the start of their journey to elevate early careers within their organization. This mix of experience made for a rich discussion across many topics, from authentic attraction methods, diversity, new routes for early talent into organisations, nurturing talent pipelines, hiring for skills and potential and how to bring the business along for the ride! 

My key takeaways:

• Assessing for skills and potential allows you to remove traditional methods of assessment that can have adverse impact on certain diverse groups, and coupled with educating the business on the benefits and considerations around this change, as well as having a method for reviewing and refining your approach, can lead to strong outcomes that help build your future talent pipelines. 
• The competition for talent is increasing and early talent candidates are looking for authentic messaging and storytelling to help them decide where to apply. Utilizing existing early talent employees and ambassadors to create meaningful day-in-the-life insights for candidates to get a true picture (the good and the bad) of what it is like to work for your organization can open doors for talent that wouldn't have previously considered applying and increase the retention of your new hires; ‘shiny’ imagery that paints a perfect picture no longer resonates and leads to disappointment once the candidate joins.
• Retention of early talent during, and post-program, is an ongoing challenge that employers must prioritize through robust development, progression and retention strategies. Being clear in your attraction on the possible career pathways, again through real examples and authentic storytelling, as well as the development a person will receive, is something that candidates today are definitely looking out for.

There were so many other takeaways and I look forward to continuing the conversation in further roundtables and conversations. Thank you to all of the participants for an engaging and open discussion and to Debra for another expertly facilitated session. If you would like to be part of future roundtables or want to discuss your early careers talent strategy with myself or other AMS experts please reach out to me at lauren.cunningham@weareams.com