Rotation or direct to role?
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Organisations vary between recruiting graduates directly into a role, or providing a scheme that rotates graduates around a series of placements. The placements may be within a department (eg Finance or HR), or companywide. How do you decide which approach to take? What decisions are needed for a great rotational scheme?
There are various issues to consider in deciding on the design of a graduate scheme, and whether to rotate is one of the decisions that needs to be made early on. Let’s look at some key questions you should ask yourself, to decide on which fits your need.
1. What is the ultimate objective of your scheme?
If you are aiming to create flexible general managers and leaders, who can move from country to country, or function to function, rotation will give them a broader based experience. If you want to create well rounded professionals, and perhaps achieve chartership or professional qualifications, rotation within a department makes sense. If your organisation is specialised, and you want graduates to take up roles and acquire specialist expertise before they progress to leadership, direct to role may be a good choice.
Thinking points:
- Do you need general managers or global managers?
- Will graduates with no in-depth expertise be credible leaders in your organisation?
- Is it better to add breadth by secondments, placements or project work at a later point (eg 2 or 5 years in), for just those graduates who show most promise, or who desire a generalist or global career?
- Does a rotational scheme with 6 month placements make sense in the context of your organisation? Or will this mean that graduates with a drive to add value become frustrated because they can never tackle a project and bring it to completion within a placement?
- If you have a rotational scheme you’ll attract graduates who enjoy variety, are not yet fixed on what they want to do, and thrive on change. If you then feed these graduates into an organisation that requires people to specialise for 5 – 9 years before they can progress to wider roles or leadership, you may frustrate them, and they may leave.
- Do you want all your graduates to be fast trackers who progress fast to senior responsibilities? Or are you happy if a number of them progress to professional and management roles and deliver excellent work there? Rotational schemes are usually created as ways of delivering the former, rather than the latter.
- Rotational schemes where there is no guarantee of a job at the end of the scheme, will attract graduates who are confident in their abilities, and willing to take a calculated risk.
- Direct to role schemes will attract graduates who want to deliver and add value, those who have a specialist preference, those who lack confidence in taking a gamble with their career, and those who have a need for a solid career move that allows them to start repaying degree debt.
Be aware that if you are selecting graduates at 21, you cannot predict what they will ultimately want in their career. A minority are very clear on their future at 21, but the majority have little knowledge of the world of work. In the course of their first 5-10 years, they will sample different things, and may discover that something they thought they wouldn’t like, in fact becomes their passion. Therefore, it’s sensible to ensure that any plan has some flexibility, to allow for choice and the chance to renegotiate their career path.
This does mean that you can’t always commit to functional sponsors, that a 2 year scheme will result in an exact number of graduates choosing to stay in their area; of 8 graduates selected into a Finance scheme, 2 may find they wish to use their qualifications to transfer into general operational management, for example. Rotational schemes are therefore better at delivering a cohort of graduates for the business as a whole, while direct to role schemes are more reliable in delivering people for a specific part of the business. This is why rotational schemes are often set up to be ‘owned’ by HR or corporate, rather than their salaries being paid by the line department they are placed in.
4. Consider the length of the rotations
Ambitious graduates are generally attracted by rotational schemes, but are ignorant of the reality of the pressures and frustrations of moving every 6 months to a new team/new work/new location. The biggest complaint is that they can’t take responsibility and make an impact. Therefore consider:
- How long do you need to be in a rotation to get the benefit from it? In some cases, it might be 9 months to a year. In others, 1 month. In some areas, shadowing for a week, or engaging in a cross-divisional project, can give breadth of understanding without the disruption of a regular 6 month rotation.
- If a graduate has little or no professional work experience, a first rotation of 9 months or a year can allow them to get fully comfortable with the work environment and actually deliver something of value before rotating.
- A short rotation into a frontline role (eg 2 months in a call centre) provides awareness. A long rotation into a frontline role (eg 1 year) allows the chance to experience managing a team to improve results. Is this best provided early, or later?
- Rotations can operate for 1 year, 18 months or 2+ years. In general, graduates find 2 years of rotations frustrating, due to their desire to take responsibility and deliver added value.
- Can you allow graduates to set up their own 1-month placement in an organisation they are interested in? Good sources are customers, suppliers, partners, industry bodies, or universities. These parties are often willing to provide experience or engage in joint projects with graduates who are paid from their own company.
- Consider doing a ‘round peg in a square hole’ placement. This is a 3-month placement that takes the graduate right out of their comfort zone into a role that they find scary. This is useful to provide early stretch, and break through barriers that might otherwise limit the options that graduates pursue in their career. These usually include working with another culture – eg working in another country, in a blue collar environment rather than a professional one; in a fast-moving sales or operational role rather than an analytical one. An example is an IT graduate used to working in a professional environment, taking a role supervising a blue collar night shift in a factory, supported by a very experienced supervisor and line manager. These placements require intensive support – for example, careful briefing, setting the graduate up with excellent sources of help and advice, and weekly communication by the Graduate Team.