This month Charlie Ryan MD of The Recruitment Queen piloted the BRIDGE THE GAP Program with St Joan of Arc School. This program was aimed at 14 to 15 year olds to help students understand at a younger age the expectation of employers and the process of job hunting – essentially bridging the gap employers are facing today. The program essentially depended upon 15 of our clients offering up a whole day to do interviews for students who had applied for a job on our website. All students were taken through an application and telephone interview in order to secure the face to face interview with the company.
Over all 50 students applied and 40 made it through to the face to face stage with our clients across the Watford, Rickmansworth and Chalfont areas. Of those 40, 7 were “no shows” but on the whole we have already had fantastic feedback from the companies who undertook the interviews.
Each student will now get their own feedback on every stage of the process as to what was done well to where they need to improve. This will include spelling, grammar and detail on the application for through to dresscode, body language, voice tone & language.
And finally the biggest part of the success here is that over 10 of the students have been offered paid work experience for the Summer with a view to offering an apprenticeship if they do want to enter the world of work after their GCSE’s!
Thank you so much to Corona Energy, Landmark Chartered Accounts, IT Trouble Free, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Bugler Developments, Fairweather Insurance, MK Ginder & Sons, Savills Estate Agents, Save Water Save Money, Kier, The NHS, Active Air, & Barclays as without the contribution of time from these organisations and individuals we would not have been able to deliver this. We are going to be running this opportunity across 10 schools next year so if you are looking for either your son or daughter or have this experience then please get in touch with their school to get them to be one of the schools involved. Or perhaps you are involved in a local company and would like to offer us an interview day for next year.
Help us continue this amazing Pilot from this year to become a standard in schools with the local employers being more involved.
