You’re Hired: How To Get Work Experience At HT

Bron Eames, managing director of Haslimann Taylor, writes:

It is graduate work experience season at HT, which is great news for everyone! Graduates have a better chance of getting a job with some good work placements on their CV and our account handlers benefit from extra help.

Simple eh? Well, not that simple, actually.

Firstly, we are committed to giving our graduate and undergraduate work placements a proper work plan. This takes time. Work placement students at HT can expect a good cross section of tasks with an allocated manager. There will only be an occasional requirement for tea making or photocopying and there will definitely be a chance to write copy, join in a brainstorm, speak to journalists and if at all possible, sit in a client meeting. Everyone fills in feedback forms at the end of their stay with us and attending a client meeting was a recent request that was acknowledged and actioned. They will, we promise, get a true insight into a career in consultancy.

The other reason that accommodating work placements is not simple is that we have to trawl through an awful lot of applications to find suitable students. Now we are not necessarily looking for rocket scientists here, but, like many agencies and PR departments, we are inundated with requests for work experience, for which we are very grateful, but an alarming proportion of them are barely literate. The majority are not checked for spelling, grammar or punctuation. No effort has been made to find the name of the person responsible for recruitment, no research has been done about the business, but there will likely be a bland plea for an opportunity based on ‘excellent communication skills’, a few pub jobs and maybe a starring role in the school netball team – I don’t care! I want to know if they write for the university paper, are involved with community radio, have done voluntary work for a local charity, sent in reports to their local press, created a website, campaigned for a good cause, found something interesting to say about one of our campaigns.

So far, every year we have ended up with a dozen or so students who are bright, hard working, enthusiastic and with a real appetite to learn. We love having them and generally, I hope, they enjoy the experience. We may never see them again, we may employ them, but either way I believe we have duty to help get young people on the career ladder. I also believe that careers advisors and tutors have a duty to explicitly instill in their undergraduates that they need to step up to the mark, and students need to understand that if they can’t be bothered to put some care into their applications, potential employers will not even bother to read them. Fair enough, don’t you think?