It’s good to be back on the Spilling The Beans blog following on from the fleeting visit I made just over a year ago. As optimistic as I was when I first started, not even the hype and promise of Talent 10 could have prepared me for the whirlwind I was about to get swept up in. Looking even further back, I can’t believe this time two years ago I was a chaotic conflict of beaming self-belief and confidence crumbling nerves as the date for my Grant Thornton assessment centre drew rapidly closer – was it to be impending doom or the start of a new chapter??
Today I’m blogging to you after 18 months of cold hard experience as a trainee at Grant Thornton. I’ve recently relocated to the hustle and bustle of London and I am just about to move from the Business Risk Services team to our Financial Services Advisory Group . To say I’m excited is an understatement; although the thought of starting in a new team, learning new skills and acquainting myself with a different sector is daunting to say the least.
In the meantime though I have a much more pressing and dynamic task to blog about- a secondment into the grad recruitment team where I am helping to design and deliver the (soon to be award winning – watch this space!!) Grant Thornton Business Advice Challenge 2012. The main objective of this secondment is to flex my hitherto shy and misguided creative muscles and take on a central role in coordinating Grant Thornton’s spring campus campaign .
It’s incredible to think two years ago I was on the receiving end of a surprisingly smooth yet never the less nerve racking Grant Thornton recruitment process; now I’m helping to promote it. I’m seconding for 6 weeks to design and deliver Grant Thornton’s spring graduate recruitment campaign across over 30 university campuses, trying to reach out to undergraduate talent, develop our employer brand, and communicate our key message?that Grant Thornton is an ambitious organisation looking to attract and develop the top talent required to unlock the potential for growth in dynamic client organisations.
Promoting talent mobility is a key objective for Grant Thornton (and great fun if you’re the secondee!!) I’ve been given the precious opportunity to learn from fresh experiences as I work with creative agencies, as well as enlarging my internal network and building and enhancing a uniquely innovative online campaign.
Our new recruitment campaign went live nationally on the 23rd January, the centre piece of which is the Grant Thornton Business Advice Challenge. Quite simply, Grant Thornton will be posing one question a week over a six week period, on issues ranging from student entrepreneurialism to social media and the economy, for you to answer. The trick is that you need to answer via a short film and students will be invited to record their responses through either our graduate page (graduates.grant-thornton.co.uk) or by posting videos to our Facebook page (GrantThorntonRecruitmentUK). To win, you need to get the most ‘likes’.
The most ‘likes’ each week, along with the next four best liked of the competition will be judged to win a runner’s up prize of an iPad2 and a 12month career coach, with the overall winner getting that and a trip to London with a friend, overnight stay in a 4* hotel, dinner at a posh London restaurant with some trainees and a partner, and tickets to the Barclay’s wireless festival. I think I might quit and re-apply just to get involved!
I’m almost at the end of my secondment now and I’m surprised at how fast it’s gone, how much I’ve enjoyed it, and how much I’ve enjoyed working with the team here. I’m really proud of the work I’ve done, and I hope you find the competition and campaign as interesting and interactive as entrants as I did bringing it all together. I’ve got the big bad world of financial services waiting for me next week and you never know, maybe even another blog sometime soon after that.
Click this link to get to the new competition
This entry was tagged with Graduate recruitment, Secondment.
