Employers ‘should think long-term about recruitment’

08/10/07 17:44

Businesses should start thinking ahead about how they will recruit, keep and motivate their staff, according to new research.

The study, published by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the professional services provider, is composed of questions asked to almost 3,000 graduates from the UK, USA and China who are due to start work with the firm.

Findings are said to give an insight into the mindset of ‘millennial’ professionals and will give an indication of how to structure people management in the future, pushing companies to plan ahead with their recruitment strategies.

“The future is not a place we go, but a place we partially create,” said Michael Rendell, partner at PWC. “The challenge for employers is to create a platform for talent management brave enough to look beyond the mid-term and focus on what kind of organisation they want to be 15 years from now.”

In addition, further results showed that only 0.6% of British graduates believe they will be able to work predominantly from home, contrasted to 7.4% in China; while over a third of UK respondents said that they expected to use a language other than English at their work, challenging the commonly held belief that language based degrees are in decline across the UK.

The survey also found that levels of perceived corporate social responsibility vary between countries: 90% of graduates from the USA say that they would seek an employer whose ethics match their own (with a similar proportion in China), while the UK falls behind, with 71% taking ethics in account.