Graduate recruitment and selection
19, October 2017

For the third year in a row Maitland was asked to run the recruitment and selection process for a large government agency. They were aiming to recruit between 25 and 30 students in their final year of university for one of four areas – General Corporate, Workforce Data Analysis,  Information and Communications Technology and Finance and Business,. The graduates were to begin work in February of the following year.

The recruitment process was broken into two streams with the Finance and Business stream conducted in the first half of each year to coincide the graduate recruitment period for the major finance and accounting firms and the other two streams in September of each year.

Maitland organised the whole process after the applications had closed and Maitland organised all of the following stages of the recruitment process:

  • Short-listing
  • Short-listing meetings
  • Notification to those who were initially unsuccessful
  • Notification to those who would be invited to attend an assessment centre
  • Design of the assessment centres
  • Trained internal assessors
  • Four assessment centres, which included a written case study as a separate exercise
  • Another short-listing based on the assessment centres
  • Organised and attended interviews
  • Wrote interview questions
  • Contacted referees
  • Provided feedback to applicants who asked for it
  • Wrote the recruitment and selection report

Maitland was involved in the first year after winning an open tender and this was extended once, based on our successful performance. A request for quote was issued for the third year and we also won this.

Feedback we have received each year has been very complimentary with comments such as:

  • Maitland has refined the process so now it is much better than it has ever been
  • The consultant knows the department and its expectations so it is very easy to work with her
  • The consultant guides us through the process
  • Since Maitland became involved the recruitment process has been much quicker and there have been no appeals
  • The graduates who were chosen to commence work the next year have fitted in very well and none have dropped out
  • We would like to use Maitland every year